Urban Lab+, Turning Tables. Graphics: UDLab-Università della Calabria. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

Turning Tables
Education guides architects and urbanists towards a responsible position in time and space. Through education, it is possible to question, evaluate, relocate, and re-identify this position.
Where is intervention most critical, most effective? How can educational institutions learn from each other, recognize common ground, and unite to challenge existing models that simplify, segregate, and monopolize urban space? We have observed that although urban issues are complex, space has been simplified, although cultural diversity is rich, daily existence is segregated, and although resources are plentiful, access is scarce.
The laboratory format of Urban Lab+1 aims to step outside the standard university framework and find new ways of preparing for action, for reflecting on and interacting with, the urban environment. It aims to turn the tables between Europe and the Global South, between theory and practice, and between inside and outside institutions. In order to guide the makers of the future environment, it pursues an expanded range of practices, protagonists, disciplines, and “cultures” in the urban debate.
Turning Tables describes our combined positions.
A round wooden table is constructed reusing Palazzo Mora timber.2 It is removable, rebuildable and transferrable to our home labs and beyond, inside and outside institutions. On the table, nine placemats set a place for each urban laboratory and one for invited guests joining the table during the Biennale. At a range of scales and in diverse cultural contexts, the projects embedded in this table will tell the stories of our Topics: Commons, Climate and Social flux; our Strategies: Reappropriation/Regeneration, Adaptation/Mitigation, Cooperation/Inclusion; and our Tools: Games, online Platforms, and Maps.
A participative educational program will be developed for the table over the period of the Biennale3: interested groups and Biennale visitors are invited to participate in the learning exchange at the table and expand or contribute to the stories initiated by our labs. It will become a space and an educational resource in an open-ended process. Accompanying the events at the table, an online platform records and organizes events in real time, plus offers a virtual time/space at the table for distant participants.4
The turning table is the platform utilized to present positions and to create an evolving set of relationships, which we argue will be essential to our very existence in time and space – new forms of learning and collaboration must be found. The turning table refers to the exchange of expertise, dialogue, and democracy, but also to a purposeful critique, suspicion, rejection, and reversal of existing paradigms.

1 funded by Erasmus Mundus Action 3, 2012-15. Labs: U-Lab TU Berlin, Urban Lab
University College London, CUBES Wits University Johannesburg, KRVIA Mumbai, X-Lab Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, laba EPFL Switzerland, UDLab Università della Calabria, School of Architecture Chinese University of Hong Kong.
2 Turning Table construction workshop: curated by Biennale Urbana & urban lab +
3 Coordination of event program: IUAV Istituto Universitario di Architectur di Venezia,
Biennale Urbana & urban lab +
4 Sponsors: ETT S.p.A. & laCosa