Surface for Urban Innovation: The Politics of Designing Poverty in Colombia and Czechia

The SURBANIN project explores the global operation of social innovations that tackle urban poverty through architecture, art or design (AAD).

Various schools, collectives and studios use AAD to help poor communities of the global South through innovating their material environment, but this trend is visible in the global North, too.

Social innovations thus have played an increasingly important role alongside more established global and national social policies.

However, regardless of their positive or negative impacts, they are very often locally decontextualised and isolated from the urban and cultural politics that make poverty. As a result, such innovations may not eliminate poverty, but rather redesign it.

The project will compare “slums” in Colombia and homelessness in Czechia to establish a novel understanding of how innovations globally emerge and travel, how they are locally implemented and with what impact.

Rather than fully embracing or rejecting AAD innovations, the project inquires why they are adopted and whether the context of adoption determines their outcomes.

The research for this project, having been undertaken first by the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and then by the Georg-Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, will focus on a number of heterogeneous social innovations: from cable cars and macro-murals in cities of Colombia to small-scale architectonic improvements and design innovations in homeless encampments in cities of Czechia.

Combining cultural anthropology and its study of everyday life with the urban-sociological and urban-geographical emphasis on urban political economy, and with urban planning’s interest in the development and design of urban environment, the project addresses a number of EU and the United Nations priorities and goals and will provide crucial knowledge to develop new strategies and tools for tackling urban poverty in the contemporary world.