Lecture: “Creating shared spaces together: the power of the new roles of architects”
Elina Alatalo is an architect and researcher in Environmental Policy of Tampere University, Finland. Her recent work has concentrated on new proactive forms of urban activism, getting vacant spaces back into use and developing sustainable urban neighbourhoods. Elina is a co-founder of Insurgent Spatial Practices -collective that explores the valuable knowledge that alternative cultures and grassroots develop in the city. She also teaches Landscape Architecture in Aalto University in Helsinki and coordinates there interaction for societal impact in Co-Carbon research project that looks on urban nature.
In her work, Elina focuses on co-design methods and self-organising community approaches. In this lecture, she will discuss how to create meaningful participatory processes and how to deal with the messy-quirky situations arising in them. She will also share some theoretical lenses that help in making sense of the dynamics in these processes. The power of the new roles of architects will be illustrated through three inspirational projects. From realizing a community sauna to facilitating the development of a network of self-organising coworking spaces and making the typology of Nordic Superblock real, we will see that co-creation is worth embracing.
