Post-post-collective city
Author name: Denys Zhdanov
Instagram account: @d.zhdanov.design
Website: https://www.behance.net/denys_zhdanov
The starting point of the project is to reflect how the post-confinement period can affect Ukrainian social housing and how inhabitants can adapt this post-soviet urban space to face pandemic or post-pandemic life conditions. The project is integrated in the context of a group of Ukrainian post-soviet residential districts built in the 1970th (districts Peremoga 4, 5, 6, the city of Dnipro, Ukraine). The goal to rethink, as well, the meaning of “healthy living” not only through physical but also mental, social and natural health.
During the current health crisis, the nature started returning to cities very fast: in just few weeks wildlife has occupied empty streets, water and air has been cleared without human activity. Thus, we will have to learn how to “cohabitate” an urban space with nature. That could also cause the transport system changes. Probably, a car will not take such an important place in peoples’ daily life. Thus, an objective of the first part of the concept is to rethink the traffic system of these districts based mostly on a large highway which in Soviet times was an ideological sym-bol of industry progress: Heroiv Avenue (from Ukrainian—avenue of Heroes). The idea is to replace this highway by a water way. In that case, a post-soviet neighborhood’s urban fabric represented mostly by huge empty areas (yards and backyard) will be superposed by a system of canals and lakes that flows into the Dnipro River letting the water move back into the city and closer to people.
The second phase of the concept makes reference on the utopian architectural project of Yona Friedman (Hungarian-born French architect) “La ville spatiale”, allowing a new development of urban planning: the three-dimensional city. During last months, the line between notions of “inside” and “outside” has been changed. Sometimes, we were trying to regain a public space at our homes. Otherwise, the “outside” started looking much more dangerous for some of us. Thus, probably in this post-confinement period we will need to invite spaces existing between “inside” and “out-side”: an intermediate phase between private and public space. It is a system of walkways that “plug in” residential buildings by extending their common areas (halls, corridors, stairwells) that lets inhabitants go outside without leaving their homes.
The different shapes and configurations of these structures make up another form of public space, an additional layer reflecting archetypes that we are used to see in the urban space: plaza, square, alleys, nodes, backyards, etc.
