ila-co.place

fluid[c]ity

Living Summer School
2022

a project in response to the Living Blocks theme of >new kids on the block< during a week long interdisciplinary summer school in Kortrijk, Belgium. The theme articulated issues around climate displacement, housing and attitudes towards mobility.

Together we found ways to iterrupt the efficient scripting of the city, imagining changing forces and directions outside of our individual control. The project is an attempt to experience the city as agents of play.

Our story of Kortrijk begins with the story of its river. Named after the bend in its water, and having prospered on the connectivity that it offered for industry, the city has a deep connection to its fluvial foundations. And yet the primary human relationship to the Leie has been to control its intuitive meandering, to straighten, organise and contain.

The notion of invasiveness is predicated on a reading of space that consists of borders and containment. Our challenge is not to accommodate adaption between disparate groups of actors, but to form a new way of relating that is non-static, borderless, and generative.

In current Kortrijk, community initiatives begin to offer a different perspective on human relations with other city actors. A visit to Wildernis gives insight into how children can be reconnected with a sense of play, plurality and ecology, even within the urban context. Within these autonomous play spaces, free/floating objects (like car tyres, pans, ropes, logs) allow kids to create environments of flux, interpreting what we might understand as objects with single purposes, and meaningfully displacing them across the site. We are interested in this open attitude towards items, how curiosity can make them conceptually multi-dimensional, and how this curiosity leads to interaction and animation.

We became intrigued by the word invasive, particularly the hostile and presumptive dimensions of this word when it relates to xenophobic responses to displaced peoples. The binary narratives around immigration told in media aimed at the ‘receiving’ populations offer a summarised view of populations victim to climate catastrophe or conflict, rather than nuanced individuals. Similar to our binary perception of objects, these peoples are defined in media primarily by an invasive characteristic. We began to consider emulating the environment of the adventure playground in the city, how to do this, and if it could encourage more engaged, playful and receptive responses to change. The word invasive also evokes nonhuman displacements, of seeds, species, across geographies. In this way we begin to pay attention to all the actors that constitute the city.

The notion of invasiveness is predicated on a reading of space that consists of borders and containment. This applies at all scales, from our own sense of self, to family units, to city zones, municipal borders, states. Our challenge is then not to accommodate adaption between disparate groups of actors, but to form a new way of relating that is non-static, borderless, and generative. Challenging binary readings of space and people by accepting and participating in changing landscapes that cannot always be predicted, fluidity is understood in opposition to conducts of rigidity. It is both a form of active engagement and preparedness for a changing city. We consider the river held between its hard walls. The city too, contains a potential fluidity that is exerted when bordered spaces and behaviours are challenged, when it is tipped from its container.

Awake and at play in a fluid city, inhabitants cultivate an intimate knowledge of the ecology they exist within. In pursuit of this, we see ourselves as design activists, we develop modes of testing displacement response among the city-folk. We use floating objects such as cut branches, broken street furniture, leaves, sand, stormwater, to create in-situ interventions. These intervene at points of rigidity and either act as a deterrent to these existing patterns, or prompt the consideration of alternative actions. We hope that these playful deviations from hard city infrastructures will create plot holes or unexpected character arcs that help the actors in Kortrijk to grow, care, fail, critique, to learn and love, with their changing co-actors.