Machizukuri Salon: Self-build Community Shelter

We propose a collective refuge, a place to reenact publicness in areas where public space has dangerously decreased. In particular, we envision its application in the decaying rural and suburban areas in Japan. We propose to introduce the Japanese term “Machizukuri,” literally “town-making,” as an early approach to community-based, bottom-up urbanism that appeared early in the 1970s in Japan, and has gained prominence since. We aim to create a prototype of a “public salon,” a refuge for collective encounters, that can be quickly built in these shrinking areas. In many rural areas, large-scale shopping malls have substituted the traditional streets, and public pedestrian life has disappeared. These areas require new points of encounter, an oasis of publicness in a privatized desert.