Members
- Müge AKKAR ERCAN
- Roberto GOYCOOLEA PRADO
- Paz NUNEZ MARTI
- Furkan Erdem SÖZERİ
- İrem Duygu TİRYAKİ
Reported by Müge AKKAR ERCAN, Furkan Erdem SÖZERİ and İrem Duygu TİRYAKİ
WHAT DOES THE SPACE WANT TO BE?
Group 5 focuses on developing an urban design methodology rather than some concrete design ideas for the Ümitköy MCMH site. The group agrees that design is not an outcome but a continuous process of creating a product, such as a project or a space. Without this process, it is hard to define a product. Based on this idea, the group describes an inclusive design process with several stages where different stakeholders are involved with different roles. The design methodology emphasizes the continuous involvement of stakeholders to achieve a sustainable outcome. For this reason, this project offers an endless design perspective. The outcomes never have an end. Once they exist, they become the input for another new design process. The second critical outcome of the project is to ask the residents what their housing neighborhood wants to be in twenty years. While the answers to this question are very generative, the residents’ responses lead Group 5 to propose a regenerative idea: The Garden School, which is proposed as a regenerative site tool to contribute to the community through its economic, social and ecologic gains, will produce a “self-sufficient” neighborhood. Group 5 offers the idea of building the Garden School in the shared space, located in the middle of the housing site. Currently, the site is not used effectively. The school site will mostly have plant growth spaces, such as aromatic plants, to be sold in the School and the commercial center of the housing site to raise some funding to spend on common everyday needs of the community. It will also act as a gathering space for socializing for the residents. In the School, gardening and compost-making workshops, education for children, adults and other community groups will help create a community feeling again, which has been lost in the site over the 3-4 years. Building the Garden School will also develop an ecological renewal of the housing site by using organic compost making, renewing the earth in the gardens, and practicing the gardening ideas in the individual gardens of each apartment block. In this way, the Ümitköy Site will be physically and socially improved, and the residents’ quality of life will be self-sufficiently and sustainably enhanced. Improving the physical image will generate a community feeling, and residents will start to be willing to become a part of the community of the housing site. With the help of the sales point and workshops, the site will earn economic income, and the site’s community will use this revenue to meet the Ümitköy Site’s needs without having to take money from the residents. The Garden School project offers a long-term, generative and inclusive design perspective. It also defines a “co-design” process with the residents’ participation and bringing together the site’s social, economic and ecologic aspects.
