Urbicamp
Date: April 2021 - June 2021 Course: Researching the Future Everyday Collaborators: Nina Boelsums, Piet de Koning
With the increasing frequency of heatwaves in the Netherlands, citizens will be forced to seek summer comfort indoors with air-conditioning. This future is not affordable for everyone and ultimately unsustainable. What if public space facilitated comfort during heatwaves?
In this course, we investigated summer comfort in the Dutch public space, and how conventions of comfort might shift when everyday practices move outside. Through conversations with the homeless community in Eindhoven and an autoethnographic study using ‘Urbicamp’, we explored the proto-practices of a future where urban twenty-somethings reprogram the public space as a living space to cool down.
Through a fictional news article from this future, we explained how public space plays a role in facilitating both physical and social comfort for living, in order to design a future that provides sustainable and affordable summer comfort for all.