On-site construction waste processing . Comuna 01 - Barrio Manantiales

INSITU

By James Brazil and Founding Partner UAbureau

INSITU is an initiative founded in 2011 to implement projects that investigate the informal development of cities, its non-consolidated urban spaces and auto-construction processes. Its central objective is to explore how the ecological and the social environments of the City can be merged to create new and unforeseen landscapes.

INSITU is directed to students and young professionals from urban, art, architecture, design and construction fields to work in conjunction with their own local communities to design and build a series of small scaled public interventions. In the summer of 2012 and 2013, INSITU was structured as a design-build workshop focused in the barrio of Manantiales, Medellín, Colombia. In the fall of 2013, INSITU was approached by a consortium of public administrations headed by Ruta N and UNAL to develop a city-wide project for the inaugural Medellin Innovation Festival. The project entitled INSITU: Comuna Innova (Innovative Neighbourhoods) was conceived as a social and participatory project to develop innovative community driven strategies that incubate social and technological innovation.

The metropolitan area of Medellín consists of 16 Comunas (districts) and 5 Corregimientos (greater urban areas). 21 separate public installations that initiate the consolidation of urban spaces that were once for ‘no-one’ into places for ‘all.’ The concept and site of each intervention is participatorily diagnosed then collaboratively designed and built between external stakeholders and local communities in a period of 7 weeks. INSITU addresses the design of the city from within and between the psycho-geographical limits of its neighbourhoods, activating local communities and the public spaces they inhabit.

The rapidly urbanized city produces one type of material naturally, waste. In developing and developed countries alike, waste is improperly disposed of and migrates from and between non-consolidated urban spaces. INSITU has developed an on-site production process in which specifically designed industrial machines are installed to process and transform construction waste or solid demolition debris into a new hybrid cement aggregate. It is an innovative form of urban conservation, reducing the carbon footprint of transportable material by utilising found construction waste whilst preserving the memory of a demolished structure and/or public space. Here we commence working with communities to identify these spaces and introduce material strategies in the social production of place, often creating micro-economies of waste collection in the process.

The effective administration of participatory designed and built public spaces relies heavily on it being executed in a compressed time frame, which builds INSITU’s most important asset, that of ‘trust’ between us as external stakeholders and the community. Our approach to the design and fabrication is subsequently highly malleable allowing us to move quickly between prototyping and design development phases. We utilise advanced computational tools and digital fabrication techniques to manage the projects and address factors such as speed, ease to replicate, durability and auto-constructive assemblies as issues of priority.

The design guidelines for the assembly and installation of the public space are entirely orientated to allow for maximum participation of the community. Highly responsive systems of fabrication, production and installation facilitate this exchange between rapid prototyping and participatory design. In the production phase of the project we transform, in the case of INSITU: Comuna Innova, every available place of fabrication in the entire city, into a temporary productive space. In the future we aim to build custom on-site digital fabrication machines in the local community centres, schools and businesses we currently activate in the production of adjacent public spaces they share.

Each INSITU project is equally about collaboration, community interaction and learning about the city, its local processes and its citizens. Projects are varied in scale and type, ranging from playgrounds, skate parks and community kitchens to an array of urban furniture designs in public space and urban agriculture. INSITU projects are currently being developed in partnership with various universities, city municipalities and local communities in Australia, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Spain, Venezuela and Turkey.