From ECOWEEK in Rome to ECOWEEK in Agios Nikolaos.
Image:Marko&Placemakers_Northala Fields Park
Marko&Placemakers is a London-based consultancy offering tailored advice for cities drawing on transformational principles of placemaking and green urbanism. Our team of urban designers, researchers and architects with a unique combination of skills in city design, urban strategies, masterplanning, user engagement and development frameworks is working across the public, private and third sectors.
Jorge is an architect, urban designer and researcher working in the interdisciplinary realm amongst urban studies, political science, social sciences and design, keen on bridging disciplines and knowledge. He has collaborated with Marko&Placemakers since 2013.
Give us some background on your work:
Marko&Placemakers is part of a growing wave of new architecture practices that fundamentally shift from a product-focused to a process-based urbanism. Our work is often strategic, looking at the overlaps between place, process and people, and goes beyond the physical aspects of design to address socio-economic issues. Our practice is part of London Mayor’s special advisory team for High Streets regeneration and we have been working across cities in the UK and Europe to support development of livable neighbourhoods.
Jorge has practiced architecture and urban design since graduating in Madrid in 2004. Since then, he has been an urban designer and architect within several established international practices including West8 (Rotterdam), Cero9/AMID Arquitectura (Madrid) and Josep Llinàs (Barcelona). Alongside his work with Marko&Placemakers, he is developing his PhD at the Bartlett School of Planning (UCL) in London, where he studies the relationship between participation, community and publicness through socio-material relationships. Marko&Placemakers has a strong research ethos, with the practice currently leading the new London School of Architecture’s Unstable City think tank exploring resilient systems for city making.
Image: Marko&Placemakers_Kiev participatory framework
What brings you to Agios Nikolaos? Have you been involved with ECOWEEK design workshops in the past?
We were involved at the London ECOWEEK in 2014 and are excited to be part of the initiative again this year in Crete.
What is your ECOWEEK workshop team will be working on in Agios Nikolaos?
We are planning to rethink the Sisi´s waterfront, a village on the coast 15km away from Agio Nikolaos. We plan to build a communication tool to engage with the public in order to collect different ideas for the future development of the area.
Have you been to Agios Nikolaos in the past? What ideas and expertise you bring to Agios Nikolaos in Crete?
Jorge has been in Greece and Crete a couple of times before. His experience could combine the foreign understanding of the place as an outsider with community engagement as an activist. His PhD thesis explores public participation. His fieldwork research for this focused on the development of an ethnography in el Campo de Cebada, a publicly owned site leased to a heterogeneous group of people to be managed as an open-air culture hub in Madrid.
The workshop in Agios Nikolaos will draw on this experience to propose a hands-on light construction design that will engage the students and the local community in a joint effort and discussion on a specific issue.
Image: Marko&Placemakers_Irwell River Park
How do you think you can change the public domain in Agios Nikolaos to something more community-led and sustainable?
The idea of the ECOWEEK workshop is that the work developed during that week does not end there. We propose to engage the local community and stakeholders in the process in order to generate a sense of belonging, which will help develop a sense of joint responsibility for the space. We also envisage that an ECOWEEK team can remain involved to develop further some of the ideas and structures that will be created during the one-week workshop. This can be done in cooperation with the municipality to make the most of the ideas that we will develop for Agios Nikolaos.
Where can one find more about your ECOWEEK workshop in Crete and about your work?
For more information on ECOWEEK workshop and how to participate visit: http://www.ecoweekcrete2016.org/
To find out more about Marko&Placemakers visit our website: www.markoandplacemakers.com
For Jorge’s fieldwork thesis visit: https://eventualurbanism.wordpress.com/
And for Jorge´s individual projects and collaborations visit the website of his collective ExposeProposePoliticise at: http://www.exposeproposepoliticise.com/