raumlaborberlin

During our Warsaw visit we passed by several post socialist, in-between spaces that obviously have no formal purpose and which were often occupied by informal uses like markets and its economies. Not only those “waiting” spaces are occupied , even regular street space is used by people selling their goods on the sidewalks. In combination with the loss of “jarmark europa” as warsaw’s central informal trading site, a serious lack of space for these activities emerges. Our argument is, that the informal part of the cities economy is an important part of urban diversity and its user – interface. The informal markets generate an alternative way of establishing businesses, of individual careers and learning economic and social networks.

We propose a small scale solution with its units spread out all over the city, inserting occupiable structures in the cities fabric. In the drawing you can see these structures in different stadiums of appropriation: from the emergence through the ground, they kind of crystallise as a new layer in the urban and add unprogrammed space to the urban setting. We conclude there need to be three types of spaces in the city: private, public and informal space.