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PARALLELSPRAWL

RALLELRAWL

The exhibition

Partners

The PARALLEL SPRAWL project is supported by the organization EPFL Without Borders, a service of the Alumni A3, with the aim of linking the EPFL graduates in Switzerland and abroad and allowing experiments in collaboration and international coopera-tion.

The project is partly funded by SDC, the Swiss Agency for Devel-opment and Cooperation

The project also receives a media support from Albinfo.ch, an information web site for Albanian community in the Switzerland.

The Embassy of Kosovo in Switzerland is also supporting this project by the Ambassador himself.

Projet Parallel Sprawlc/o Kunik de Morsier architectesPlace de la Cathédrale 51005 LAUSANNE

www.parallel-sprawl.org

Contents

PARALLEL SPRAWL 4

CONTEXT 4

URBAN SPRAWL 5

OBJECTIVES 5

READINGS AND VISIONS 8

THINKING URBAN SPRAWL 8

THE EXHIBITION 9

THE INSTALLATION 9

TEAM 15

PARALLEL SPRAWL

PARALLEL SPRAWL is a collaborative study on suburban land-scapes in Kosovo and Switzerland. We are interested to look in both countries at built spaces that are neither city centre, histori-cal centres, touristic hot spot nor countryside. This is what we usually call here suburbs. We assume that these spaces are of a singular importance (number of households and habitants, ac-cessibility, effect on the landscape, ...) and that we urgently need to develop a specific approach to analyse and understand them. Therefore, we are working together on both conditions in order to propose new readings and visions for these landscapes.

CONTEXT

Switzerland and Kosovo are both strongly affected by urban sprawl and the resulting landscapes are surprisingly very similar. The fundamental difference lies in the genesis of these land-scapes, on one side fruit of fifty years of local planning relying on individual préférence, the car and the middle class and the other side result of the collapse of the state due to a recent war and the rise of self construction.

Switzerland’s Mittelland has largely been developed since the fifties, creating a continuous suburban area where major cities of the country are located. Highly decentralized planning has completely transformed the Mittelland and has led to many disadvantages such as an important increase in the consump-tion of natural resources but also a radical transformation of the visual environment of this part of the country.

In Kosovo, it is only since 1999 that rapid suburban urbanization invaded the country. At that time, the country was just starting to recover from a devastating war in which a large number of family houses were destroyed. At the end of the war, major international aid provided residents with the necessary reconstruction materi-als, allowing them to built new homes totally outside of any legal framework. Now that the bubble is over the large part of the plains have already been covered by family houses and commer-cial infrastructures.

Matran, Switzerland, 24.06.2013

Map of urban sprawl in Switzerland

Map of urban sprawl in Kosovo

Viljance, Kosovo, 28.04.2013

URBAN SPRAWL

Urban sprawl is a type of horizontal low density urban develop-ment which took off in the post-war period. Its roots are already found at the turn of the nineteenth century in utopian projects such as garden cities where air, light and public health were con-sidered as new design factors. It was in the 50s, at the time of Europe reconstruction that the model of the villa in the outskirts took its big boom, facilitated by a thriving car industry, an expan-sion of the road network and energy at a very low cost.

Fifty years later, this dream has become true and has spread in most parts of the world that saw the emergence of a middle class. Today, these places have become nightmares for planners and local actors, but also often for their inhabitants.

Living in suburban has become more and more restrictive and problematic as these areas are monofunctional, consume high amounts of energy and often accessible only by car. Suburban villa areas were never built close to schools, places of leisure and meeting venues or trade. The dream of living in the country quickly changed so that these areas are now often seen as dor-mitories for the middle class.

Today the diagnostic regarding urban sprawl is clearly evident. This “porous” city is the result of financial opportunities of urban rules or the lack there of, but also a certain lifestyle, the insuf-ficiency of public governance and of course the lack of forward looking visions. The territory can no longer be wasted. A balance must be found between all the constitutive elements of our living environment such as urban and suburban areas, agricultural areas and areas of forests and mountains.

GOALS

Our goal is to understand suburban landscapes in Switzerland and Kosovo and through an exchange, find solutions both here and there.

By observing and documenting in parallel suburban areas and their functioning, we want to highlight their key issues, reveal their respective organizations, their similarities and their differ-ences but also confront our ideas in order to discover new read-ings and visions.

This project provides a common basis for discussion and consider our means of action in the territory according to a new approach. A discussion on the possible future of these territories should be opened, and this project should be the platform for such action.

Hochdorf, Switzerland, 06.01.2013

Round table with Ilir Murseli, Dukagjin hasimja and Albert Heta, Quendresa, Kosovo, 16.08.2013

Dulliken, Switzerland, 23.06.2013

READINGS AND VISIONS

Our approach toward urbanism is here based on what Paola Vi-ganó would call two basic epistemologies namely describing and the project. The first is the subject of our investigations on site in Switzerland and in Kosovo. A time of discovering, observing and describing our surroundings and milieu. The last is about an ongoing project on the city with artists, politicians, civil society and contractors.

The originality of our approach is that it is performed in paral-lel on two situations. Of the two situations described in the exhibition one is of a very rich country whose sprawl has been developed for decades and on the second situation it is of a poor country where sprawl has been developed in the last fifteen years. Everything about the two seems to be in opposition, but there are shared key issues and topics of interest, and thus, solu-tions that can be exchanged and ideas that can be shared. Both can teach and learn from the other in order to improve suburban areas, making them more sustainable and more friendly.

As attentive walkers, we document landscapes with open eyes, listening to the local inhabitants as well as the planners in order to give depth and identity to formal quantitative informations. It is an approach to urban study that is original also because it is founded on the discovery of the territories rather than on statistics or maps. It is urbanism seen as from the ground by the inhabitants, with their practice and everyday life.

THINKING URBAN SPRAWL

Urban sprawl is a generic word defining more or less everything that surrounds a city. Through our field trips and investigations we discovered that the concept of urban sprawl does not reflect the reality and the multiplicity of what we discovered. We therefore prefer today the phrases “diffuse city” or “porous city”.

We think that it is important to offer a vision of the future for those territories and to the diffuse city, and as a new genera-tion of suburban thinkers we take another worldwide look at the suburban landscape and urban sprawl. We have to look at them with a sympathetic eye and consider theses territories as rich areas for investigation and study. Home to many of us, suburbs have become part of the culture of our generation. As in some way it embodies pop culture, urban sprawl should not be consid-ered as a failure or a mistake but as the starting point of a new way of planning our living environment, where urbanization and nature are each considered in turn.

The diffuse city has unique potential to be calibrated to the com-fort and needs of its occupants, as it poses both challenges and opportunities found in the traditional urban fabric.

We also believe that the diffuse city is the beginning of a new kind of cities integrated to the landscape and also achieving the new goals such as maintaining a social network, providing food to the majority or even being sustainable.

Our first tool to achieve our goals is the collaboration between a multiplicity of professionals from different disciplines and back-grounds. Collaboration is here seen as an exchange relationship to develop solutions for a highly developed country like Switzer-land and for a transition country like Kosovo. We are convinced that observing suburban areas here and there can only fuel the discussions held in parallel on each territory and bring unexpect-ed and surprising ideas.

For years urban planning has focused only on city centres and urban areas. It is now clear that suburban areas and the porous city surrounding the core cities must be studied.

This project is dedicated to politicians and decisions makers in-volved in urban and rural planning looking for creative, low cost and highly efficient urban design.

Map of Switzerland and Kosovo

Trajectories through Switzerland

Trajectories through Kosovo

THE EXHIBITION

After a year of investigations, study, meetings and interviews with diverse people, today we are showing the results of our work. This exhibition synthesises our work in both countries and paints a picture of what is, for us, the city of tomorrow.

It is about space in the diffuse city but also their inhabitants, their way of life, the way they represent themselves and the way they interact with their surroundings. It shows our vision of the suburban condition and also about the space making (or made) by urban sprawl.

This exhibition is made of two facing wall-drawings showing the multiple scales the spatial relations one finds in urban sprawl in Switzerland and in Kosovo. It documents our on-site and road-trips findings, giving a parallel reading of the two situations. The drawings are isometric views inspired by medieval maps and territorial representation.

The drawings represent in an explicit and easy to read manner the complexity and multiplicity of our findings. When cross-ing the two countries we have identified three main scales of interaction between people and their environment. First it is the scale of the house where one enjoy the relation from the private sphere to the immediate public space, the close surroundings of the house. Second is the scale of the community or the villages. Here one relates to a broader community, through shopping, study, exchanging goods, meeting for religious activities or collective and political affairs. The third and last scale is of the territory or the landscape. One relates to it mainly as a source of identity. People know the names of the mountains in the distance or remember remote places where they formerly lived. These concentric readings appear in the setup of the exhibition as we show in drawings and text the three levels of spatial relation-ships: the house on the bottom of the wall, the community at the centre of the wall, and finally of the landscape at the top of the wall. This allows the information to be given in perspective, remi-niscent of the feeling we have when touring in the suburbs. The wall drawings are large-scale drawings which presents simulta-neously and with equal importance urban sprawl from the house to the village to the landscape.

In the centre of the room is an installation by the artist Driton Selmani about the construction and architecture of sprawl.His vision as an artist on the suburban and the urban sprawl ques-tions our everyday experience of the places we live and opens our eyes to a new understanding of these areas. His installation will be a series of 18 sculptures filling the space and showing imaginary, dreamy or nightmarish houses and buildings.Cloister St. Urban, Langenthal, 1630

Wall drawing

Art installation, Driton Selmani

Wall drawing narrative principle

LANDSCAPE

COMMUNITY

HOUSE

Schematic drawing of the exhibition layout

PARALLELSPRAWL

RALLELRAWL

An Exhibition about space in the

suburbs and their future.

KOSOVO

Schematic drawing of the exhibition layout

An Exhibition about space in the

suburbs and their future.

SWITZERLAND

KOSOVO

TEAM

Valentin Kunik is a Swiss architect and lecturer based in Switzer-land. In 2009, he graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technologies in Lausanne, specialising both in architecture and in urban development. He has worked with several artists and architects both in Switzerland and in Spain. Since 2012, he has lectured at Fribourg College of Engineering, Switzerland. With Guillaume de Morsier, he founded the office of Kunik de Morsier architects in Lausanne in 2010.

Guillaume de Morsier is a Swiss architect who graduated from EPFL in 2009. He worked for the office KCAP in Rotterdam and Zurich as an urbanist and researcher for large scale urban plan-ning projects for two years. He is co-founder of the office Kunik de Morsier architects and a lecturer at the Fribourg University of Applied Sciences. He is currently working on several projects and research studies on social housing developments and adapta-tions in Switzerland and abroad.

Rozafa Basha is an architectural engineer and urban designer educated in Prishtina, Kosovo , graduating in 1975, and in Lund, Sweden, graduating in 2010. Her work experience in the past 12 years ranges from designing small-scale architecture in her own practice, working for different architecture offices in Kosovo on larger-scale projects, and on collaborating on international governmental and non-governmental projects in the reconstruc-tion of war-damaged buildings throughout Kosovo. She has also managed conservation works for historical buildings, continues to teach in the Department of Architecture at the University of Prishtina, and is pursuing research for a doctoral thesis at the Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania.

Driton Selmani holds a MFA from The Arts University Bourne-mouth UK. His artistic investigation is in a constant ‘experi-mental initiative’ and it has a close relation with complexities occurred in his cultural identity. Cultural belonging, dualism and migration are forms of his artistic research that he’s focused on, as elements of significance in his attempt to combine the past and present events in his creative process as intention to arouse new tools of thinking that reflects the current reality related to his exploration. Lives and works in Prishtina and Doganaj.

Projet Parallel Sprawlc/o Kunik de Morsier architectesPlace de la Cathédrale 51005 LAUSANNE

www.parallel-sprawl.org

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Projet Parallel Sprawlc/o Kunik de Morsier architectesPlace de la Cathédrale 51005 LAUSANNE

www.parallel-sprawl.org