Raumlabor Berlin is a German collective practicing what they call “research-based design”, working at the intersection of city planning, architecture, art and urban intervention.

Raumlabor are urban practitioners, working on extending the field of architecture into contemporary societal struggles through targeted ‘urban interventions’– projects that seek to disrupt previously retained notions about space. The process is experimental and iterative, always involving the community as design partners. Drawn to difficult urban locations, places that are often abandoned or in transition and offer the untapped potential for experimentation, they challenge the utopian-ism of the 20th century which tried but did not succeed in bringing about better living conditions for everyone.

By their own description, Raumlabor Berlin’s approach is ‘dynamic urbanism.’  They have combined research, community engagement and radical forms of practice to create new ways of making public space. Some of their recent works include Symbiosen, a “parasitic architecture” structure that used abandoned wood, textile and a shipping container to create a pavilion at the Fragile Festival held at Wuppertal in 2023. It served as a commentary on the purposefulness of discarded material and the possibilities of symbiotic coexistence between “space, matter and user”

In 2022 they published Making Futures, a book that explores the role of architecture in the 21st century and presents action-based research which views the field as “an agency, rather than a collection of objects” One of the spaces where they put these ideas into practice is the Floating University Berlin, built into the rainwater retention basin of the former Tempelhof Airport. In the summer of 2018, students and scientists from more than 20 international universities met with artists from all over the world, local experts, architects, musicians and dancers to examine everyday urban life and formulate proposals for its reorganization. Together they collaborated on building the campus – learning spaces, workshops, an auditorium, a laboratory tower for experimental water filtration systems, a kitchen, a bar and toilets – creating an open infrastructure with seasonal spaces for learning and working. After its inaugural year, the energy created around the Floating University remained and it is now run as Floating e.V. – a self organized space and group, where practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds meet to collaborate, co-create and imaginatively work towards futures.

Public Works is a London-based critical design not profit set up in 2004 that occupies the terrain in-between architecture, art, performance and activism. It delves deep into the challenges posed by contemporary urbanism to seek new ways for communities to reassert control over their own futures.

Depending on what is appropriate for the project, Public Works designs across medium and scale, from research to urban planning to furniture and participatory art, with the unified goal of stimulating new thought about how public space can be claimed.

Public Works’ programmatic direction comes from a belief that public space is a powerful convener and the way that it is organized can create new, more productive forms of social interaction.  For example, the Granville Cube project began as a piece of “street furniture;” a simple metal frame structure that travelled to various locations around the Granville New Homes site in the South Kilburn neighborhood of London. Modest in its construction, the structure stimulated community connections and served as a place for small scale local events. Public Works organized weekly events that involved local residents, ranging from caroling, flower planting, creating fish tanks and other esoteric functions. The Cube, while small in scale, shows how designers’ simple interventions can often catalyze entirely new forms of community interaction.

Public Works also launched “The Public(s) Land Grab,” a live research project seeking alternatives to capital-led urban development and its intrinsic inequalities. Increasingly, cities and citizens rely on developers to fashion their environments. This project investigates whether residents can build the capacity to develop without developers. Can they use regeneration as an opportunity to level social inequalities and address local issues such as unemployment and community well-being? The initiative began with a community garden in a vacant lot and then used a building workshop, legislation and negotiation with the city council to build local agency. The research will culminate in a handbook of citizen strategies that can be used as a counter to capitalistic development.

Public Architecture is a San Francisco, California based architectural non-profit whose mission is to formalize and act as a connector for pro bono services within the professions of architecture, interior design and landscape architecture.

Public Architecture was founded by John Peterson and grew out of his private practice, John Peterson Architects. Peterson began devoting more and more of his firm’s time to pro bono projects and conceived of the possibility of a national or global network of firms which perform a similar connecting function.

Public Architecture’s flagship program is called The One Percent. It began with an audacious but scalable goal: ask architecture firms to formally pledge at least 1% of their billable time to pro bono service. By asking for this commitment, Public Architecture aspires to not only provide needy social projects with design services and change the way firms do the other 99% of their work. To ensure these firms can find appropriate pro-bono projects to work on, Public Architecture acts as a match-maker, connecting architecture firms that wish to donate their time with non-profits in need of design services. 

Peterson is the current curator of the Loeb Fellowship. His work has appeared in several books and publications, including The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong, The New York Times, Architectural Record, Architect, Metropolis, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. He has contributed to books such as Expanding Design, Urban Interventions, and The Power of Pro Bono.

We spoke with John Peterson, along with Emily Pilloton of Project H Design, on Social Design Insights. Listen to the episodes below.

Proximity Designs is a not-for-profit social enterprise working to reduce poverty for rural families in Myanmar.

In 2004, Proximity founders, Jim Taylor and Debbie Aung Din sought to create a social business for Myanmar’s underserved rural families. Their initial focus was irrigation. Motorized pumps are expensive and most of Myanmar’s farmers do not have electricity or funds for fuel. A collaboration with students from Stanford University’s Design for Extreme Affordability program helped the Taylors develop one of the cheapest pedal pumps available, costing only $45. 

In a country where manufacturing and finance systems were underdeveloped, Proximity had to ensure its products could get where needed. In addition to the 150+ agricultural shops selling the organization’s products in villages and market towns throughout the country, Proximity Designs developed a network of sales representatives and independent agents to reach farmers who rarely traveled to town. This village-level distribution chain was so effective that Proximity Designs became a first responder when Cyclone Nargis devastated the Ayeyarwady Delta in 2008; ultimately, they delivered over $17 million in emergency aid to 1.2 million farmers.

To address credit famine, Proximity Designs offered low-risk installment loans to farmers, syncing the repayment schedule with the crop cycle. Over time, Proximity customers have seen an average annual income increase of $348. 

Today, Proximity offers low-cost and climate-smart farm technologies, agronomy advice and farm financial services. In 2018, Proximity launched Myanmar’s first affordable soil diagnostic testing kit, providing farmers with customized recommendations on the amount of fertilizer to apply to crops. This service helps farmers reduce unnecessary input use, increases farm productivity, and restores soil health. Later, Proximity began to sell Trichoderma, a biocontrol agent effective in fighting black stem and many other soil-borne fungal diseases. Trichoderma also improves soil quality, crop growth, and yields by making nutrients more available for plants. 

Proximity has also worked at the macro level, engaging in policy discussions with the Myanmar government and other stakeholders to share research and findings, facilitating dialogue around the critical issues facing Myanmar. 

As of 2022, Proximity has reached 1.3 million farm households, enabling approximately 5.6 million people in rural Myanmar to grow their farm enterprises and afford basic food, health care, and education for their families. Today, as a result of the changing political and economic landscape of the country, Proximity Designs tackles global issues such as climate change, deep poverty, food insecurity, inequality, and political conflict.

Prinzessinnengärten is a bottom-up community garden in Berlin notable for both its scale and its ingenuity in starting a public conversation about the democratic use of public space.

The original initiative was started in 2009 on a site in Berlin that had been left as a bombed-out wasteland for over fifty years. While the surrounding area remained rough and urban, the 1.5-acre litter-filled lot eventually became a lush oasis of herbs, fruit, flowers, and even bees; and a gathering and educational space that symbolizes community resilience in Berlin. 

Beyond just food production, the garden brings together the diverse interests of the low-income, largely immigrant neighborhood and has become a platform for knowledge exchange. It is open to everyone; there are no personal or private vegetable beds. In return, no one can harvest their own crops for themselves. All the vegetables produced are grown to support the entire garden. Most participants are amateur gardeners, taking part as a form of hobby. 

Everything is grown in Euro pallets, shipping containers, disused rice sacks, and tetra packs, so the garden can be moved and set up again at another site whenever needed. This mobility allows a relationship with schools, universities with agriculture programs, and community organizations looking for new ways to address health or integration issues within the neighborhood. 

Over the years, Prinzessinnengarten has become a major attraction. Every season, around one-thousand volunteers help with the gardening, and approximately 40,000 people visit the garden annually. The concept continues to challenge the city of Berlin and beyond, raising questions about space, authority, and urban ecology.

Ten years after its founding, the land lease ended. In 2019, the original garden was transported to a new and larger location, a cemetery in Neukolln. Currently, the Prinzessinnengarten spreads through the cemetery, in between classic and slightly dilapidated graveyards with cracked headstones. Exuberant greenery and well-maintained vegetables grow either in raised beds or soil, distributed at three different spots.

We had an opportunity to speak with Marco Clausen of Prinzessinnengärten about how they came to pioneer a form of mobile gardening, and the positive impacts it has had on their city on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

Project Row Houses (PRH) is a community platform that enriches lives through art with an emphasis on cultural identity and its impact on the urban landscape. They engage neighbors, artists, and enterprises in collective creative action to help materialize sustainable opportunities in marginalized communities.

Inspired in part by African American muralist John Biggers, who painted black neighborhoods of shotgun houses as places of pride not poverty and German artist Joseph Beuys who addressed how people shape their worlds, Artist Rick Lowe engaged six other African American artists—James Bettison (1958-1997), Bert Long, Jr. (1940-2013), Jesse Lott, Floyd Newsum, Bert Samples, and George Smith. Together, they began to explore how they as artists could be a community resource and catalyst for change. Upon discovering 22 abandoned shotgun style row houses, Project Row Houses commenced. 

PRH now occupies a significant footprint in Houston’s Historic Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. The site encompasses five city blocks and houses 39 structures that serve as a home base to a variety of community-enriching initiatives, art programs, and neighborhood development activities. Although PRH’s African-American roots are planted deeply in Third Ward, the work of PRH extends far beyond the borders of a neighborhood in transition. The PRH model for art and social engagement applies not only to Houston, but also to diverse communities around the world. 

PRH programs touch the lives of under-resourced neighbors, young single mothers with the ambition of a better life for themselves and their children, small enterprises with the drive to take their businesses to the next level, and artists interested in using their talents to understand and enrich the lives of others.

All of the arts and cultural programming of PRH is referred to as “Public Art,” developed to respond to, involve and reflect the community. In PRH philosophy, arts and community are integrally necessary for each other– art is not viable without community and community is not viable without art.

Turquoise Mountain is a nonprofit focused on regenerating urban areas and furthering the renaissance of the traditional craft industry in different parts of Asia.

Founded in 2006 by the Prince of Wales, Turquoise Mountain revives historic areas and traditional crafts to provide jobs, skills, and a renewed sense of pride within communities. The organization has restored over 150 historic buildings, trained over 15,000 artisans, developed over 50 small businesses in the Middle East, treated over 165,000 patients at their Kabul clinic, and supported and generated over $17 million in sales of traditional crafts to international clients (including Kate Spade and London’s Connaught Hotel). Turquoise Mountain has also curated major exhibitions at museums around the world, from the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. 

Since its founding, Turquoise Mountain has worked in Afghanistan and continues to support thousands of families in Kabul, Bamiyan, and the northern region by providing support, education, and family health services. They also generate livelihood opportunities through craft production and the preservation of built heritage.

In Myanmar, Turquoise Mountain has trained hundreds of artisans across crafts to enhance the quality of work. In 2016, the nonprofit completed the restoration (the first to meet international standards) of a street in Yangon’s Historic Downtown, educating 250 people in building and conservation in the process. In 2019, they reimagined the landmark Tourist Burma building, training over 500 builders and engineers while reinstating the building as fit for public use. 

In Saudi Arabia, Turquoise Mountain is giving hundreds of artisans access to new commercial opportunities that preserve craft traditions. They aim to build a sustainable crafts sector that reflects quality and authentic design to appeal to clients across the Middle East and beyond. The nonprofit also holds workshops on entrepreneurship, branding, production, and more to help artisans develop their work.

In Jordan, Turquoise Mountain works on heritage-led regeneration projects that support local communities and the wider population through employment and training in historic building restorations. In doing so, Turquoise Mountain supports the economy, helps communities in the long term, and maintains the significance of the region’s history.

Urbz is an experimental action and research collective specialized in participatory planning and design. They work with citizens, associations, local governments, and private clients in Mumbai, Bogotá, and Geneva.

Urbz was founded in 2008 by Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava, and Geeta Mehta in Mumbai, and now has additional offices in Bogotá and Geneva. The diverse team of architects, designers, urban planners, anthropologists, economists, and policymakers bring various skills to shape each project from many different perspectives. The collective is committed to information sharing and public participation, operating under the belief that the everyday experiences of the residents of the communities they work with constitute essential knowledge for architecture, planning, urban development, and policy-making. 

In addition to their physical work, Urbz also endeavors to change the word ‘slum,’ and how it is received; ‘slums’ are not apocalyptic, crime-infested, disease-ridden sewers, but ‘homegrown neighborhoods’ that lack adequate infrastructure. The extent to which they lack such resources is often a case of deliberate political manipulation.

Urbz confronts the most daunting problem facing slums: the value of their real estate. Often, well-meaning city planners inspired to create ‘humane’ living conditions collaborate with profit-minded developers to execute the most common form of slum rehabilitation: level & relocate. Nowhere is the specter of this method more omnipresent than in Mumbai’s Dharavi – often misunderstood as Asia’s largest slum and home to somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people. 

Located near the center of Mumbai and surrounded by posh neighborhoods, Dharavi would be worth billions to private sector developers seeking to build new housing, malls, etc. The people of Dharavi, therefore, become a problem for developers and are seen as hindrances needing to be relocated for development to take place. Urbz is part of a vanguard seeking to help the residents of Dharavi by bringing recognition to the local construction practices and pushing back against the economic and political forces driving relocation. 

One such effort can be understood through the ‘homegrown street’ project, which recognizes the talent and skills of local builders in homegrown settlements by providing a space for showcasing their ideas and design imagination. Putting preconceptions aside and using an ethnographic lens that works with the language of architecture, the project explores the design imagination of local artisans who, day after day, build thousands of tiny houses that accommodate the multitude of low-wage workers sustaining the city’s service and manufacturing sectors.

USINA Centro de Trabalhos para o Ambiente Habitado (“Work Center of the Inhabited Environment”) is a cross-disciplinary Brazilian group that assists working people in the planning and development of their communities.

Founded in June 1990 by a multidisciplinary working group as a technical advisory to social movements, Usina has since worked to mobilize processes that engage the workers’ own capacity to plan, design, and build, mobilizing public finances to aid the struggle for urban and agrarian land reform. Today, their portfolio is vast; they conduct strategic technical advisories, assist in the mobilization of public financing, and conduct urban planning as well as advocacy through educational workshops and video production.

Usina has participated in the planning and construction of more than 5,000 housing units and additionally, community centers, schools, and preschools in several Brazilian cities and rural land settlements, mostly in the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Paraná. The built work serves two functions: first, it provides the schools, homes, and playgrounds that are unaddressed by the market. Second, it assists in the formulation of local advocacy organizations, providing visible, tangible evidence of the people’s power. Usina has also participated in the development of urban planning projects, and slum urbanization, and aided in the formation and organization of cooperatives.

In recent years, Usina has extended its activity to include the visual arts by producing videos, exhibition projects, and popular education workshops — all of them linked directly or indirectly to its work in planning and constructing the inhabited environment. Video production and advocacy are intertwined with the built projects; all are bent on changing conceptions of how and why the built environment exists the way that it does. They seek to move away from an individualistic and profit-driven motivation for construction and attempt to reverse the “logic of capital” to produce a built environment that is more equitable and just.

Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) is an interdisciplinary design studio dedicated to high-level research and design at a variety of scales. The studio champions collaborative work with intended users as a tool to develop spaces and projects that reinterpret the potential of unbuilt areas.

Alfredo Brillembourg founded the Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) collective in 1998 as an informal multi-disciplinary research group in his home in Altamira, Caracas. In 2001, Brillembourg invited Hubert Klumpner to co-found the U-TT NGO and later in 2007 to co-founded the U-TT company in Caracas, Venezuela. Brillembourg and Klumpner continued their partnership in Zürich until 2019. 

Now that cities have been established and developed, U-TT argues that it is time to depart from outdated, urban-centric, nineteenth and twentieth-century architectural models. Instead, the current focus of architecture should be using design to improve unbuilt environments. For example, in the twentieth century, organizing low-­income neighborhoods in vertical towers proved to be a general failure. Thus, U-TT has prompted an exploration into using the vertical to address dense slum conditions and urban neighborhoods. 

To residents of New York or Tokyo, the notion of building vertically is a familiar concept. However, in many slums/barrios/favelas around the world, builders lack the heavy equipment or capital to build vertically. U-TT approaches the use of verticality in a new light; residents are the organizers of their own space, and these spaces remain open to constant modification. By using new approaches to incorporate verticality into the redevelopment of unbuilt environments, it has the potential to become a tool for the community to create new spaces and open areas for new businesses, recreational facilities, and more.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, U-TT created an alternative teaching platform, called “Dis_Local”. The work is driven by the idea that good products and processes will only arise when the discourse that births them consists of both words and actions. 

In the past couple of years, U-TT has started to adapt to the new conditions post-COVID and to refocus on building a global practice, beginning with development projects in South America and expanding to South Africa, Uganda, Columbia, the USA, and Norway. 

We had the chance to have an amazing two ­part discussion with Alfredo and Hubert on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episodes below.