Insitu/en

Insitu is an initiative founded by Blokcad Lab and uAbureau in 2011 to implement projects that investigate the informal development of cities, their unconsolidated urban spaces, and their self-construction processes. The central objective is to explore how the ecological and social environments of the city can be combined to create new and unexpected landscapes. Insitu is divided into three development components. The first focuses on social participation and inclusion in participatory design and construction processes. The second focuses on emerging technologies and innovation through the use of digital design and fabrication tools. The third involves an ecological and environmental reflection on the site through the recycling of construction and demolition debris.

Insitu is structured around a social and technological platform for knowledge exchange and collaboration, not only within the city but also between neighborhoods and communities worldwide. This is achieved by blending different disciplines and working with academic institutions, the public and private sectors, community groups, and designers. One of its overall goals is to foster intelligent relationships between the inhabitants, users, and builders of the cities or areas of intervention. The organizing team seeks to be deeply involved in the program, as its approach is geared towards working with student groups and both local and international communities to explore how technology and participatory design can create dynamic relationships and unique public interventions.

The above explains the purpose of the general project scheme, to propose, obtain and conceive a physical product translated as an intervention, incorporating both the parameters detected in the place, as well as the set of techniques and methods of design, production and manufacturing that involve the work team and participants.

General objective

Insitu, as a global approach, embodies its objective around the creation, communion, and interaction between builders, architects, designers, artists, and citizens who form the network of users and active participants of the metropolis, through a deep dialogue that explores and exposes the set of needs, dimensions, visuals, and other aspects observed by the city's inhabitants, thus obtaining a response in the treatment proposed by the group of professionals and actors participating in the program, marked in the formal manifestation of physical elements at a 1:1 scale, where the concept, form, and function appear as the synthesis of the project line to be developed.

Specific objectives

• Social inclusion and participatory design
• Focus on emerging technologies and innovation
• Ecological-environmental reflection on the place

Interventions

• 
  Manantiales, Colombia (2012)
• 
  Manantiales, Colombia (2013)
• 
  La Campana, Monterrey
• 
  Breathe, Cambridge (2015)
• 
  Ahuachapán, El Salvador (2015)