Читать книгу Manifesta 13 Marseille - Группа авторов - Страница 7

Co-founder of MVRDV and Director of The Why Factory (Delft University of Technology)

“Can an antimodel of a city be a place where to think the future?” was the title of the first bid sent by the City of Marseille to the director of Manifesta in 2015.Marseille is often presented as a world unto itself. Geographically isolated behind the barrier of rocky hills, facing the Mediterranean Sea and north Africa, the city has a reputation for disobedience, multiculturalism and complexities.

As a city of flux, transit and trade, Marseille responds to a diversity of contradictory connotations. Today, the city offers a rare prism through which to investigate multiple questions crucial to connecting Europe’s future and current crises. Marseille reveals much about how people have dealt with displacement, exile, dispossesions, cultural resistance and assimilation as well as the social consequences of these. It also presents approaches to urban renewal, religious diversity and economic transitions, which are necessary to safeguard the social and cultural diversity of togetherness.¹

Our first encounter with the City of Marseille took place in 2018, when we accepted the challenging invitation by Manifesta to conduct the pre-biennial urban research for 2020.

It became a huge, exciting challenge and a complex journey that we, MVRDV and The Why Factory, were allowed to pursue. We therefore thank Manifesta 13 Marseille’s director and the team for their generous invitation to the biennial, the city of Marseille and all those, who shared their stories, opened their institutions, schools and doors to us and placed at our disposal all the data, histories, knowledge and support we needed to understand this incredibly complex puzzle. Without their help, our team would not have been able to analyse, digest and develop our concept and all our findings. We thank all of the interviewees in Marseille for their valuable time and their patience, including the residents of Marseille; the designers; representatives of bottom-up associations; city representatives; academics; experts and representatives of the education, healthcare, architectural and urban sectors. We thank them for giving us their time, allowing us to enter their homes, their offices, their Marseille. We congratulate them for keeping their beloved city alive.

We extend our immense gratitude to the students from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the National Higher School of Architecture of Marseille (ENSA-Marseille) and the Marseille-Mediterranean College of Art and Design (ESADMM). Without their time and dedication the proposals that created this Mosaic of ideas, utopias and dreams would not have seen the light of day.

We thank the professors of these universities in Marseille for believing in our project and allowing their students to join this collective effort.

We greatly thank the team at AGAM (Agence d’urbanisme de l’agglomeration Marseillaise) for the time they spent reviewing the data and sources of the cartography we produced. We thank the team of Le Tour de Tous les Possibles, Joke Quintens and Tarik Ghezali and their colleagues, for helping us complete the Mosaic through a citizen network. This network will hopefully continue as Manifesta 13 Marseille’s legacy, encompassing the ways in which the city is positioned, dreamt of and further developed from the bottom up, drawing inspiration from its 850,000 citizens, long after the departure of the biennial.

1. Referenced from Marseille’s official bid for Manifesta 13.