The 7th edition of Festival Bellastock 2012 starts today in the heart of Ile-Saint-Denis (France). In just 5 days 1000 students of architecture, with the help of the association Bellastock, will use discarded materials to build a temporary city on a site of a former warehouse. On Saturday everybody is invited to visit it and take part in the public workshops and meetings.

reSITE Festival aims at reflecting on the current changes in urban planning in order to understand how to build public spaces for all and to use a participatory planning approach. From May 21 to 27 the city of Prague (Czech Republic) will host interdisciplinary conferences, workshops, film screenings, urban games, public design discussions and cycling events for both citizens and professionals.

To learn more: here.

Flashback: ESTUAIRE 2007-2009, a trail from Nantes to Saint-Nazaire (France), to discover the landscape from a new point of view. Waiting for 2012 edition.

Art installations by Tatzu Nishi, Roman Signer, Tadashi Kawamata, Daniel Buren and Patrick Bouchain.

© Gino Maccarinelli and Jean-Dominique Billaud / Nautilus Nantes.

It resides in the space between sculpture and public design. This is Tentvillage revisited by Studio Dré Wapenaar, a project to set up situations of encountering, carried out in 2007 during Estuaire Nantes.

Images by Dré Wapenaar _ All rights reserved

Prammen (The Barge) was a 150 square metres floating public space in the Skanderborg lake (Denmark). Designed by the creative Bureau Detours, the wooden platform hosted a camping area, a bar, a stage for little events, a kitchen and a little harbour.

From 15th to 30th March Brussels will host the second edition of Human Cities Festival with installations, workshops, urban walks and a symposium. Citizens, artists, professionals and cultural associations will gather and discuss about strategies and tools to shape public spaces.

We’ve been working on the next edition of Public Design Festival that will be in Milan, from  17 to 22 April. With our magnifying glass we’re studying creative solutions for a new type of public space: it is less urban than an overpass but it’s undoubtedly a gathering point. In the meantime you can join our new community in Facebook.

Spontaneous Interventions: design actions for the common good is the theme of the U.S. Pavilion at the 13^th International Venice Architecture Biennale, occurring in Fall 2012. The American entry focuses on interventions ranging from urban farms to guerilla bike lanes, temporary architecture to poster campaigns, urban navigation apps to crowdsourced city planning. Submit your projects by February 6!

Public Design Festival 2011 _ Photo by Guglielmo Trupia

To create a link between the industrial zone and the residential one, Amir Lotan has completely turned an intermediate abandoned building of Bat Yam (Israel) into a recreational and social point with benches and green spots. It’s the Side Effect project.

From 22 to 26 November in Verona (Italy) within the frame of OniricaLab - the Makers Festival, the Association Fuoriscala invites students, professionals and simple curious people to take part in TASTEFULL by Studio FormaFantasma, a workshop to investigate the concept of food in all its creative interpretations.

For the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2010 the Scandinavian studio Rintala Eggertsson Architects proposed Miilu, a wooden site specific installation where to sit and have a rest.

From 14th to 17th November la Casa Encendida in Madrid (Spain) will host Urban-TV 2011, IX International Television Festival on Urban Life and Ecology. As cities are spatial entities in a constant  metamorphosis, the audiovisual media can represent an educational and public tool to help people be active citizens in shaping the urban landscape. The festival offers some examples of the best productions, created by independent authors coming from all around the world.

Carton 5000 is a project by Laurent Boijeot, Sébastien Renauld and Nicolas Turon, presented within the frame of La Ville à l’état gazeux last September. It’s the visual metaphor of the mobile city: for 72 hours 5000 paper boxes continuously shaped the streets of Tours (France) in an architectural transhumance, with a participatory process that involved all the population in changing the ordinary urban landscape. 

Photos by: Martin Clément.

In September 2011 the Railway Zone in Tilburg (The Netherlands) became a real working village: for a whole week artists, designers, architects and people built together a new temporary public space with a village square, a theatre, a factory, a pub/restaurant, a large fireplace and even a playground. It was the first edition of Huttenfestival de Vlek (Hut Festival The Stain).

As part of LIFT11, a festival of urban installations in the public spaces of Tallin (Estonia), Tetsuo Kondo Architects have presented a spiralling path among the trees of Kadriorg Park, visible until 22nd October.