A Swarming city

This project emerges as part of the urban studies and fieldwork done with URBZ in the city of Mumbai for the Istanbul Design Biennial 2012. The research aims to describe the phenomenon of homegrown neighborhoods in Mumbai and their role within the urban dynamics. Starting from a pragmatic position of accep-tance, the objective is to seek the distinctive and characteristic features of this context in order to think of a different approach to interact with this phenomenon. The prototype, developed in Politecnico di Milano in the masters thesis and further resear-ches, is meant to define, according to the entropic character of informal settlements, how this energy can renew the urban system. The purpose is to orient the growth of these neighborhoods through a weak strategy, able to control without fixing the urban form, in relationship with the socio-economic fabric. The final result is a naive but genuine vision, without the ambition to give a definitive answer of how to think about a diffe-rent action upon these neighborhoods. It is a vision that grants them the right to survive as an active and productive part of the urban system.

0-n Collection of Master Thesis of Politecnico di Milano within the Theory of WeaknessDirector and Coordinator: Elisa C. Cattaneo "0-n" is a collection of master thesis which I oversaw as supervisor at Politecnico di Milano. These books are a platform of heterogeneity, which find their common field in the theory of weakness, as imperfect and manifold way of knowledge. The aim is to experience an alternative method for contemporary spaces, able to regenerate the stabilized ideas of design. They are more experimental and vital texts/tests than verification procedures: this attitude brings them away from a strictly educational approach. They can be read according to two levels of meaning: in their specific contexts and as open platforms for contemporary researches. Almost all of them are focused on processual values and on project transdisciplinary, in order to promote a cognitive space before a real one. I provided the students with fews thematic lines (a sense of short-circuit, trial, process of meaning), which were underlining an interpretation of knowledge in a horizontal sense, as Gilles Deleuze had defined.These topics have been independently developed by the candidates, so that they can be considered as authors of a new idea. I instructed this learning and researching method, because I belive that the secret of an effective education in to coinvince each student to be able to build his own vision of the world, without stereotyped positions.I am finalising the object of education in the freedom of intelligence, and not in the rules of disciplines, by broading the students' needs and points of view. To cross the world in new expanded geographical horizons.Elisa C. Cattaneo