지속가능계획연구실

Statement:

Carnival: Strategic Temporal Festivity and the Politics of Shared Joy

“Just as an individual person dreams fantastic happenings to release the inner forces which cannot be encompassed by ordinary events, so too a city needs its dreams.”

- Christopher Alexander

 

In 1892, the World’s Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago. The city set aside some sections of the town to be used for a carnival that would display people’s utmost creativity and optimism. People were able to open their eyes to possibilities beyond the stagnant conventions that they have known and which are difficult to break away from in ordinary life.

In today’s Chicago, a similar stagnant prolongation of urban conception exists in Chicago’s south side. Its pervasive shrinkage is apparent from looking at the vacancy in its urban housing community, which increases in a gradient manner as you go south.

As a solution, we propose an Art Carnival to take place in those vacant lots―a temporal event that invites the city’s northern habitants to enjoy time together with their neighbors to the south. This grass-root-type of process of creating art needs various level of expertise. Residents will benefit from the carnival as a means to embrace the role of active protagonist. The entire process of executing the event will be received as a communal urban gesture that brings people together to achieve intricate bundle of processes in unison and, in the end, resulting in a massive form of art.

 

 

 

The carnival that turns “vacancy” into “spaces that are available for exciting carnivals” can turn city’s vision around, and break the prolonged image that once endured.