DRS2012 Bangkok Proceedings Vol 4 - Design Research Society

Making Sense of Interventions in Public Places as Drivers of Urban Renewal
state their participation in the city; their motivation varies from a combination of
intellectual, economical, and artistic reasons. The power of interventions in the city
resides in their potential to show people’s desires and actions over the control of city
places. To study interventions in both countries, Venezuela and Finland, has facilitated a
cultural learning about the utilization, or lack of, public places and their restrictions,
together with the understanding of people’s involvement. To study interventions in
different countries promotes a cultural exchange as interventions can be appropriated,
adapted and improved into specific environments and cultures by the designer,
researcher and interventionists, for instance. Exploring two different cultures and thus
ways of acting, has opened up two perspectives of dealing, exploring and experiencing
public places. For example, the great amount and array of dissensual interventions
occurred in Venezuela have shed light to a limitlessness amount of design ideas that can
help urban revitalization, urban management and to improve the image of other cities.
Dissensual interventions can open up to a whole new set of paradigms and urban uses in
restrict and highly consensual spaces. Moreover, intervening public places can gain
permanent situations and over all gain new spaces and mind-set.
The creative practice of experiments and interventions has served to understand their
role in design research. As shown in this paper, experiments and interventions have
function in various ways: as a tool to communicate ideas; for building textual and verbal
dialogue; for facilitating ideas, opinions, and inspirational material as well as for
empathizing with people. They have also served as facilitators for creating places; create
new paradigms, forms to express and, as a process to drive research work. Moreover,
design interventions have shed light into their function as vehicles of communication in
and about public places; and, as an approach for reinventing the city image.
Conclusions
The relevance of interventions within the framework of urban renewal resides on the way
temporal actions cause a significant change in everyday city places; in the experiences
and interactions of people; in the notion of appropriation of spaces; and on the innovative
uses people give to places. Interventionists are, above all, creative and imaginative
people that interrupt, whether with or without consent, the monotonous city life.
Interventions in public places help to recover and revitalize the city in great dimensions;
cultural, social, economical and environmental. The act of intervening lies in the
circumstances and needs of the interventionists, it can relate to economic, expressive, or
intellectual reasons for instance. The interventions carried out by professionals,
professional amateur and city designers often differ on the specific topics of concern. For
example, the designer acts rigorously and aims at obtaining particular results that link to
the design of the intervention; the experience of people; the role of the intervention as
part of a specific project; and, for academic research, among other topics. On the other
side, interventions by professional amateurs and city designers often do not look into
particular elements and values of the intervention itself, as they are the ones of interest
for the design researcher. Moreover, non-design interventions are often carried out only
to obtain straight results of the act, as it might be the monetary income, for instance.
Nonetheless, it is relevant to notice the know-how of professional amateurs or city
designers and their design initiative to disrupt city places and create new scenarios.
Public spaces can be considered as places for potential experimentation, especially in
the context of urban regeneration and appropriation of the city. Interventions serve to
study alternative reasons that construct the public, embrace participation, support culture
and cultural values, create scenarios, enhance (or diminish) the experience of people in
everyday places; and above all, interventions in public places contribute to the creation of
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