Levente Polyak

Among many practitioners of temporary use and the adaptive reuse of vacant buildings and spaces, Eutropian is featured in Das Packhaus‘s new Handbook for temporary use of a vacant urban resource.

Based on the findings of Interactive Cities, and corresponding to recent political events, we published an article on the URBACT platform about the use of social media in inclusive urban governance.

Our article “Building Informal Infrastructures: Architects in Support of Bottom-up Community Services and Social Solidarity in Budapest” is finally published! In Katherine Melcher, Barry Stiefel and Kristin Faurest (eds.) Community-Built: Art, Construction, Preservation, and Place. Routledge, 2017

In the past weeks, the Hungarian government resumed its pressure on NGOs. To highlight the importance of civic initiatives in delivering social, cultural and environmental services in Budapest, the KÉK – Contemporary Architecture Centre‘s Lakatlan Budapest program recently published the book Civil Város (Civic City, in Hungarian with English summary), now fully available online!

In November, as part of the Metropolitan Field Trip Vienna, we organised together with Wonderland Platform for European Architecture, Pakhuis de Zwijger, XsentrikArts and Das Packhaus the event Arriving to the Cooperative City: the Vienna Refugee Coalition, including site visits and a public event with bockwerk, Freunde schützen, Purple Eat Marktstand-Restaurant, Magdas HOTEL, Fluchtraum Österreich, Displaced and EOOS. You can read the reports here and here.

Invited by the Kultura Nova Foundation, we began a consultation series about the governance of new cultural spaces with the municipalities and civic groups of seven Croatian cities, based on the findings of the TUTUR, Vacant City and Funding the Cooperative City projects.

More information at http://www.participatory-governance-in-culture.net/

19th November 2016, h17:00 – 19:00

Location: Das Packhaus (Marxergasse 24, 1030 Vienna)

In the past years, Vienna has been facing an unparalleled challenge: from summer 2015, several waves of refugees arrived to the city in one of the largest migration movements of the last decades. In this situation, Vienna witnessed an unprecedented alliance between various public, civic and private actors in the city, whose mobilisation created many services and opportunities for refugees, including housing, education, employment, communication and integration.

In July 2016, Wonderland Platform for European Architecture and the Austrian Kulturforum Berlin brought together many of these initiatives in Berlin for a workshop to discuss practices and exchange experiences. In October 2016, the City of Vienna was announced one of the winners of the European Union’s Urban Innovative Actions call, with a proposal to create public-civic partnerships around the issue of refugee support and inclusion. This creates an unique opportunity to bring together various departments and programmes of the Vienna Municipality and bottom-up initiatives that created many innovative services in the past years.

On November 19, as part of the Metropolitan Field Trip Vienna, organised together with Pakhuis de Zwijger, Das Packhaus, XsentrikArts and Eutropian, a dozen of Dutch urban professionals and municipal officers will visit Vienna and some of the city’s most innovative urban initiatives. After a series of site visits across the city, a public event at Das Packhaus will bring together citizen initiatives, municipal officers and public program leaders as well as creative entrepreneurs addressing the issue of refugee support, to discuss the possibilities and modalities of cooperation.

Public event with 

Christian Penz (Bockwerk)
Johanna Aufner (Magda’s Hotel)
Renate Stuefer, Karin Harather (Displaced/TU Wien)
Nina Kolowratnik, Johannes Pointl (Fluchtraum Österreich)
Ulrike Böhm (Verein Lokal Agenda 21) – tbc
Harald Gruendl – EOOS – tbc

Further information

office@wonderland.cx

www.wonderland.cx

On 27th October at the Timisoara Architecture Biennale 
The exhibition Adaptable City, first presented in KÉK Budapest, gives an introduction to the logics of temporary use and adaptive reuse, discussing its fundamental questions as well as the organisational, economic, legal and architectural conditions of the reutilization of vacant buildings and sites. More information at http://betacity.eu/en/evenimente/vernisaj-orasul-adaptiv/

Eutropian co-organised in Alba Iulia the Interactive Cities partnership meeting to develop strategies on how to address cities’ audiences through social media so to improve urban governance.

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On 4th October at the Czech Architecture Days
A 22′ video by Zsolt Keserue, Levente Polyak and Ágnes Dénes about the transformation of the interiors of prefabricated housing estates. Through interviews and research, the video documents attempts and practices to domesticate and alter radically planned spaces.