COMMUNITY
WORKSHOPS
GUIDE
Follow this guide!
Here are the instructions for
potential workshop activities.
Goals
Expand the possible practioners.
Make participants aware of the existing site.
Generate ideas for the future of that site.
Sequence logic
Creating utopias (1) first helps to warm up our imagination that might be too restricted by realistic constraints. Grasping the atmosphere (2) of the site during a walking tour helps to report the emotions we experienced on a map (3). These activities will help co-create a design that portrays the community’s true aspirations (4).
Here are the instructions for
potential workshop activities.
Goals
Expand the possible practioners.
Make participants aware of the existing site.
Generate ideas for the future of that site.
Sequence logic
Creating utopias (1) first helps to warm up our imagination that might be too restricted by realistic constraints. Grasping the atmosphere (2) of the site during a walking tour helps to report the emotions we experienced on a map (3). These activities will help co-create a design that portrays the community’s true aspirations (4).
POSTER TO ADVERTISE WORKSHOPS
Now let’s try to implement those workshops in practice on a given site.
We will need a poster to find participants.
THE FINAL WORKSHOP
After many change of plans, the event took place in a youth center. With a new crowd of participants that I had never met before, I had to see this as the 1st step of collaboration.
Instead of asking one-way question and “extract” content from the teens, I used the tools to create a fun initial encounter: an opportunity to get to know them. Michael Farkas, the NPO director, helped me conduct the workshop and was responsible for all ethical considerations that working with human subjects includes. Hopefully, the participants left with a better understand of what architecture is and how to practice spatial agency in their surroundings.
MAP DISPLAYED DURING WORKSHOP
SPATIAL AGENCY:
A POTENTIAL OUTCOME
The goal of doing the workshop was that participants could hopefully leave with additional knowledge, skills, and interest for architecture. That they would be more aware of their surroundings and revisit what they thought were banal areas with very little potential. I was hoping that they become spatial agents.
Here, the said agent is one who allows him/herself to engage in their spatial environments in ways previously unknown or unavailable to them, opening up freedoms and potentials.
(Source: Spatial Agency: other ways of doing architecture, 2011)
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MCGILL UNIVERSITY
KATIA BROZ
2024