Doina Petrescu

• Professor
• Chair of Architecture and Design Activism at The University of Sheffield

How do we engage with the threat of social and environmental degradation while creating and maintaining liveable and just worlds? Researchers from diverse backgrounds unpack this question through a series of original and committed contributions to this wide-ranging volume.

Abitare Circolare è un progetto di ampio respiro promosso dall'ass. Espe- rimenti Architettonici che ha l'obiettivo di attivare un confronto sul te- ma degli scarti e dei rifiuti in relazione alle condizioni dell'abitare nel XXI secolo, con un focus sul territorio della Regione Puglia. Il progetto fa par- te di #InAgenda, un programma che comprende...

This paper investigates how designer-led co-making and civic pedagogy can increase urban learning and resilience through transversal relationalities. We explore two case studies in which designers work with communities to run civic pedagogical projects, using co-making as a tool: Collective Design Practice, in Mumbai, India, co-produced with Muktan...

While the growing commodification of housing and public spaces in European cities is producing urban inequalities affecting mostly migrant and vulnerable populations, there are also manifold small-scale neighbourhood-based collaborative processes that seek to co-produce shared urban resources and contribute to more resilient urban developments. As...

How can architecture enable civic ecological practices and community economies to fight climate change? Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou , founding members of Paris‐based atelier d'architecture autogérée, describe strategies that have been developed to facilitate this virtuous resilience cycle particularly in relation to their project R‐Urban.

In this paper we present a method for valuing the multidimensional aspects of urban commons. This method draws from and contributes to a broader conception of social or community returns on investment, using the case and data of a vibrant project, strategy, and model of ecological resilience, R‐Urban, on the outskirts of Paris. R‐Urban is based on...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to ask how forms of “performative” interventions can prompt processes of re-thinking, which can, in turn, instigate the critical production of public space. Most importantly, it also asks how this methodology can manifest within various cultural and political contexts. Today, public spaces tend to be controlled...

The paper will discuss an experimental co-design approach to the development of a digital toolkit prototype and a resulting set of co-design principles, which are put forward as a way of infrastructuring future design of digital tools for urban commoning. Focus is placed on the case study of a commoning hub in a Parisian suburb where the toolkit wa...

Where the welfare state has failed, can a new civic economy succeed? Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu co‐founded atelier d'architecture autogérée to explore participatory urbanism as an answer to today's environmental and economic challenges. One result is R‐Urban, a framework centred around ‘civic hubs’ that allows communities to enhance their...

In response to the environmental and social challenges of an uncertain future, practitioners and communities across Europe and beyond have started to engage with the concept of ‘resilience’ and experiment with forms of local resilience. However, many of these initiatives tend to remain localised, isolated projects, with little capacity to instigate...

In this paper we propose the concept of ‘open-source resilience’ as a promising path towards urban transformation and greater resilience. This proposition is investigated through the process of co-designing a digital platform, providing tools for actors engaging with resilience through urban commoning processes. Such tools will have the role of sus...

Architecture and the arts have long been on the forefront of socio-spatial struggles, in which equality, access, representation and expression are at stake in our cities, communities and everyday lives. Feminist spatial practices contribute substantially to new forms of activism, expanding dialogues, engaging materialisms, transforming pedagogies,...

The co-production of resilience in European urban neighbourhoods is explored based on the experiences from a case study. Within the current ‘resilience imperative’, co-production processes involving multiple stakeholders can be a key factor for increasing cities’ resilience. Co-produced resilience processes are more successful when embedded in coll...

This note addresses contemporary processes of resilient co-production within the city. With its specific focus on the case study of a project called R-Urban, it aims to present a bottom-up project initiated in a suburban town near Paris. R-Urban is a bottom–up framework for resilient urban regeneration initiated by atelier d'architecture autogérée...

R-Urban strategy proposes the creation of a network of citizen projects and grass¬roots organisations around a network of collective civic hubs hosting economic and cultural activities and everyday life produc¬tive practices that contribute to increasing resilience within an urban context. The hubs are key in providing the infrastructure for this c...

In the last decade, Internet access and social media have reshaped the possibilities for experimental practice in terms of reach and immediacy. Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou of atelier d'architecture autogérée (aaa) describe a project that they initiated for a collective platform in Paris that acts as a catalyst for community engagement in t...

Drawing on the author’s experience as a founding member of atelier d’architecture autogéréé (aaa), this paper explores the role and tools of the architect in mapping relational practice. With the aim of preserving urban biodiversity, aaa adopt ‘urban tactics’ to encourage inhabitants to re-appropriate vacant land into self-managed space. In mapping...

DESIGN ACT Socially and politically engaged design today – critical roles and emerging tactics is a book that presents and discusses contemporary design practices that engage with political and societal issues. Since 2009, the Iaspis project DESIGN ACT has been highlighting and discussing practices in which designers have been engaging critically a...

This edition of arq assembles a selection of papers presented at the Conference organised by the research group called initiated in 2007 in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. We offered to host the 5th AHRA International Conference, giving it the theme of and hoping that the submissions would energise the relationships betwe...

In Nicolae Ceausescu's ‘Systematisation’ programme, implemented across Romania throughout the 1980s, power was played out in acts of building. The city of Bucharest provided a visible symbol of the centralisation of authority, manifest in the construction of the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism and the House of the People. Beginning from this...

Based on actual experience, the authors of this paper show the political dimension of micro-urban tactics and the reconstruction of spaces of proximity from the margins, boundaries and interstices of the capitalist city. These interventions permit the creation of a collective and synaptic subjectivity that is capable of porous territorial appropria...

Deligny’s contribution to the contemporary thinking of community is to map the (impossible) topos of a community which can be hardly described by words (as many contemporary thinkers have witnessed) but can be traced by lines. Deligny’s use of lines differ from any other form of mapping exactly because they do not pretend to represent anything othe...

ECObox is a project initiated by the Self- Managed Architecture Workshop offering the inhabitants of La Chapelle the chance to occupy an abandoned space and to transform it into a participatory garden and a place for debate. It is a worksite at the « ground floor of round the city » in which any inhabitant can enter at their own level and propose a...