Week 6

Project Feedback Session

Focus on Courtyard Typologies

Yesterday (Tuesday 19 August 2014) we had a lengthy presentation and feedback session with our university lecturers about our way forward with the project and our ideas around possible interventions on site. In this presentation we spoke about the scenarios and findings unique to our site. Some of these include a very active retail strip along the main access street, a recycling station, a pig sty, we also have a rather inactive vegetable garden. 

This retail strip runs along the Western side of our site.

Our main focus on site moving forward will be the many different courtyard typologies. We aim to identify how these courtyards work in terms of community, security, family and collaboration, and how it can be enhanced.

The intricacies and intimacy of courtyards creates community.

Today (Wednesday 20 August 2014) we are having community engagement with the people on our site, we have an interactive model for this purpose where we want feedback from the community people about what they feel are problems on site and what future they see for Denver Informal Settlement.  Check in later for more feedback on the community engagement.

Building up

Week 6

After our successful presentations mentioned in our previous post, we took our interactive model to site to allow for opinions to be shared from our volunteers and residents of the community.

Our model is a basic massing model at 1:200 with features fixed with ‘pres-stick’ . This allows for the map to be changed according to the opinions of various role players.

Our first meeting place was just beside the veggie garden where we were able to settle and meet with tenants in the  sorrounding dwellings. The discussion was focused on the veggie patch and the possibilities/configurations it contains.

Our second port of call was ‘mam Mbusi’s’ courtyard where we discussed the attributes of the courtyard typologies.

We then  went on to neighboring courtyards to have similiar discussions and interactions.

Findings

The architecture and layout is a residue of the social constructs.

The age of our site perhaps has resulted in the unique courtyard typologies that are yet to form elsewhere in Denver.

Adding toilet facilities to courtyards isn’t as simple as it seemed.

Moving forward from here we plan to incorporate our findings into our final presentation and documents whilst continuing our partnership with the community.

The J team

The J Team