Producing Future Homes and Communities

‘Producing Future Homes and Communities: Utopias, Dystopias, Heterotopias and Other Spaces’ took place at Tate Exchange February 6-10 2018.

Students and staff from BA Interior and Spatial Design (ISD) at Chelsea College of Arts and diverse practitioners connected with the University of the Arts London engaged with ‘production’ as the theme of this year’s Tate Exchange programme. Our week in residence explored in particular the production of future communities.*

This began with walking from Tate Britain to Tate Modern with what we called ‘seeds’. These small-scale maquettes were embryonic infrastructures from which we grew a large-scale experimental build of London in 2068. Using recycled materials from Tate Modern and beyond, our version of the Big Smoke fifty years from now was collaboratively designed and created by students and members of the public, including families with enthusiastic young children who visited our Community Market on 10 February. Through 14 stalls we transacted knowledge with a milling crowd to co-produce the future of community as utopic, dystopic and a medley of other scenarios.

Communities are not something we can take for granted. They must be produced and reproduced in response to diverse conditions and considerations. Holding fast to the conviction that our shared sustainability depends on cultural and other forms of heterogeneity, our residency at Tate Exchange unfolded through a public workshops that considered emergent infrastructures, climate change, generative and other materials for urban expansion and renewal, etc. We wondered: What forms will social, economic, technological and other systems take going forward? How will these be integrated? What structures and other resources will be required to support the changing needs of education, ageing, waste management and other factors? At ‘Producing Future Homes and Communities’ we designed and built, demoed and workshopped, walked and talked through these and other concerns.

• http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-mod...