- Article
Charrette 2023: Urban Mining and Circular Design
In 2023 the KEA Charrette teamed up with a new and exiting research and development project in Urban Mining to create this year’s theme; Global Circular Competencies with Urban Mining.
Students and advisors were appropriately challenged by the theme that required the teams to think about materials, re-generation, circular economy, community involvement and value creation.
The Theme for the Charrette 2023
The concept of urban mining might ring a bell to many, but very few of the participants this year had worked directly with the concept. A string of urban mining experts were lined up to help charrette participants grasp the many technical, social and philosophical questions surrounding this field.
Kasper Lange from Hoogeschool van Amsterdan and Rune Clausen from GEUS Denmark complemented KEAs own experts on the first day. Morten Carlsbæk from DAKOFA and Nikolai Bach-Andersen and Jasmin Skøtt from Nordic Urban Mining participated in an exciting panel debate on Tuesday. With this competent, but very short introduction to the subject, students embarked on their own discovery journey into specific areas of Copenhagen.
2 groups each were assigned an area with a local expert to guide them around. It was up to the groups to decide what part of the area could be used for their urban mining concept. They were tasked to think of the following:
- Find a human-made material in your area that can be mined
- Create a concept that is of value to your local area – either an organization, community or local business
- Draw on at least on of the circular economy principles
- Engage everyday citizens in your process
The Process and the Results
Despite the very clear-cut theme of the 2023 Charrette many teams had to work hard to find the right idea to work with that encompassed all the elements in the brief. Questions arose with regular intervals: What are the actual needs of the community? What is the different between urban mining and recycling? What material regeneration is truly sustainable?
The final concepts were as varied as the answers to these questions. We got social education in Utterslev Torv, an event tree and website from discarded wood in Skjold’s Plads, new playground and social furniture created out of discarded materials from car dealerships, using 100% of discarded wood from a technical school to create flexible furniture and games for children at the Red Square, chess pieces created out of pulp mixture from old carboard boxes and a green oasis for a local café.
View the concepts below, developed and presented by the students
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This article was published on KEA before KEA and Cphbusiness merged to form EK. Names and job titles may therefore have changed. However, this does not affect the research and knowledge on which the article is based.