Description
Repurposing Book and Toolkit: Reprogramming the City and How To Reprogram the City
Reprogramming the City: The Book
The best of adaptive reuse and repurposing urban objects featuring 44 projects from 17 countries.
“This book shows the incredible transformation of what was once seen as basic urban infrastructure into social spaces and community assets.” – Isabel Zempel, Sasaki, ASLA
Reprogramming the City is a 214-page collection of over 40 examples of repurposing and adaptive reuse in an urban context from 17 countries showing innovative ways existing urban infrastructure and other elements are being reused and repurposed for new use in cities around the world. From billboards in Lima, Peru, that now generate fresh drinking water to bus stops in northern Sweden transformed to boost the mental health of commuters during dark winter months, Reprogramming the City reveals the untapped potential of adaptive reuse and repurposing urban objects for new use to improve life for urban residents.
Organized into the thematic chapters of Food and Water, Housing and Shelter, Health and Wellbeing, Energy and Ecology and Renewal and Recovery, this book shows how the full range of human needs can be realized from the assets cities already have in place through adaptive reuse and repurposing.
How to Reprogram the City: The Toolkit
How to Reprogram the City is a 40-page toolkit that introduces people to the core themes of repurposing and leads them on a journey to discover and unlock hidden potential in their city. It is the result of a decade of work, research, and workshops conducted around the world to help people improve cities by using existing urban assets in new ways.
The toolkit provides people with the tools to address a pressing problem: the new reality facing cities is one of limited resources. Whether financial, spatial, or material, the content of cities is finite. Yet the context of that content – how we use the assets we already have – is where the opportunity exists to respond to increasing urban needs using limited resources.
Constance W. –
I stumbled across “Reprogramming the City” in search of inspiration on interventions in urban public space for a project. I’m very glad I found the book as it not only displays a vast collection of interesting best practices on different scales, on a variety of topics (housing + shelter, food + water, ecology…) and from very different urban contexts (from Lima over Hong Kong to Vienna), but it also (in the second part, the “toolkit”) provides incentives to perceive our cities and their manifold existing resources (which we tend to overlook in the everyday “use” of our cities) with a playful eye, focussing on the plenty opportunities (the “containers of possibilities”) we have at hand just by changing our perspectives and by using our creativity. In times of masterplans and large scale projects, I consider this extremely important (and refreshing). I’m sure that this toolkit is most helpful for urban planners working in participatory processes, but also for students and, in general, people interested in “deciphering” their urban surroundings. An absolute recommendation.