4th IABR Squat City Competition

Today, the ability of the city to guarantee the co-existence of its inhabitants is threatened by social segregation, functional differentiation, and spatial fragmentation.

The 4th IABR ‘Open City’ is committed to display projects that negotiate between the integrating and segregating forces and enable people of diverse cultures and lifestyles to connect and interact. ,Squat City’ is part of the Rotterdam Biennale and deals with the increasingly common phenomenon of informal urban developments all over the world.

If ‘squatting’ can be understood as the process of appropriation by which excluded local actors gain access to the territory and resources of a city, then a new type of activism should focus on the strategies and techniques that allow these informal processes to develop in a more inclusive and sustainable way.

Squat City is a platform that supports the self-empowerment of local actors in the informal city.

Squat City launches a competition calling for best-practice projects in the fields of architecture and urban design.

Squat City will collect and display these projects and practices on the Squat City Community webpage.

Squat City presents best-practice urban and architecture projects to potential sponsors in order to fund their realization.

Squat City fosters strategies and practices that enable diverse co-existence in the Open City.

Competition

The projects submitted for the Squat City Competition should contribute the agenda of the ‘Open City’ by proposing inventive design strategies and techniques pertaining to informal urban development.
The call goes out to projects from the fields of architecture and urban design that are based on or that support bottom-up practices and that encourage the self-empowerment of local actors, and that help formalize and legalize such developments.

They qualify by being:

• economically sustainable, e.g. by creating jobs and supporting social business.
• ecologically and energetically sustainable, e.g. by reducing waste. or energy and material consumption.
• socially sustainable, e.g. by creating education facilities and enabling communities to become self-reliant.

http://squatcity.net/