Urban Sutures: Reimagining the informal structure

Urban Sutures: Reimagining informal structure

– In metropolitan cities like Amman, two narratives of urbanism are simultaneously prospering, the celebrated formal that is governed by laws and regulations, and the “stigmatized other”; the informal self-organized by communities. However, the visibility of the informal activities and structures usually stimulates eviction and demolition, disregarding their integration with the urban context; economically, spatially, and socially, all of which might create confusion in urban imagery and place identity.

– Amman today is formed via homogeneous functional enclaves creating thresholds and leftover spaces, which exposes deprived communities to new minor aspects and opportunities for better modes of living, this usually ends up as stigmatized fragile attempts, vulnerable to urbicide or constant conflict with the formal structure.

– The case of Raghadan-AlMahtta station is an example of the formal-informal dilemma that started to form after the temporal reallocation of Raghadan station downtown to a merely leftover vacant space between factories and other infrastructural facilities forming a strip dug into the valley between deprived neighbourhoods, with little to no means of social or economic activities. Reducing the complementary experience of urban life downtown to a merely plain transportation experience, leaving the community to take the lead in providing socio-economic activities in the thresholds and in-between spaces of the station. Based on second-hand markets and other light temporal commerce like vegetable and food kiosks.

– Urban Sutures is an urban intervention addressing informal markets by re-imagining the existing modes of living for self-organized communities and building upon it, enhancing their recognition on the cognitive map of the city by uplifting the quality of second-hand products in upcycling and repurposing processes to engage impoverished societies with a better-destigmatized economy.

– Aiming to reformulate the relationship between the formal body and its “OTHER” (the informal),; the essence of this project is based on the idea of discrete architecture as a reassembling collage of materials, activities, and ambiances in order to construct an articulated and engaging spatiotemporal experience that had traces of what had been. Instead of demolishing the informal structure, the discreteness allows the set of existing building elements to be re-contextualized in aggregation for different scenarios to encourage communal participation for better self-recognition.

– Being homogenous among transportation infrastructure, deprived residential area, and charity bodies the intervention must be based on the staging of uncertainty; and irrigation of territories with existing potentials, by accepting existing social patterns and spatialities, re-imagining, and re-integrating them. Drawing attention to the importance of including materials and activities of which the community structured their markets around, for their affordability and functionality, creating a better environment for impoverished people and healing social wounds inflicted by the stigma of informality through a narrative structure that encourages the community to be spatially active in configuring and adapting their built environment to their changing needs from their own choosing of materials that fits their economic situation.

– The program in its permanent and ephemeral nature emerged as a response to vendors’ attempts to uplift the quality of second-hand products for better prices, proposing a series of upcycling workshops, co-working spaces, and exhibitions that motivate direct interaction and exchange of tools and skills between vendors and workers, along with exposing the urban plaza on the street level to accommodate temporal social and economic interactions between communities through the vast mass-movement of passengers and locals.