Imagining a disalineated city

Imagining a disalineated city
Investigating loneliness as a symptom of contemporary city and sketching out ways to a less alienating environment.
Tereza Kalousova
Prague/Amsterdam
Links
Team members
Tereza Kalousova
Field of work
Architecture, Urban planning, Multimedia, Film, Research
Project category
Urbanity
Project submitted
2023

I studied architecture at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. I work mostly across architecture, film and research, saturated around questions of identity, home, loneliness and care in relation to the contemporary city. I investigate the changing ways of inhabiting it, their impact on society and how they manifest themselves in the urban space. Reflecting the struggle for grounding and integrity within the contemporary world, I explore the tension between exhaustion and resilience, alienation and connection.

My project is a book that analyses and addresses the phenomenon of rising urban loneliness/alienation, its spatial configurations and the effects on society. I want to look at the causes and consequences of urban loneliness and detail the need for progressive changes, as I argue it cannot be solved through point mitigation, but rather has deep political and economic roots—and therefore requires a complex and radical response.
The book will have form of a hypertext; urban loneliness is something that relates to and manifests many well-explored problematics (housing crisis, public space, segregation, urban planning,…) but hasn’t been defined within all their complexity. The book therefore “collages”, decodes and connects underlying and systemic conditions to provide an understanding of the problematic and outline possible ways of addressing it.
The project is a continuation and further development of my ongoing research on this topic, that I also explored through my diploma thesis (Keys to The City). This project would allow me to involve wider circumstances and consequences of urban loneliness and develop a part of the book that would be conducted from referential projects/policies/approaches outlining methods - both conceptual and spatial (ideological and concrete) - to an alternative future; a disalienated city. (In my thesis this is something I executed through my own architectural proposal, whereas in this publication, I would like to substitute it with methods demonstrated through existing projects/implications.)

Annotation of my diploma thesis: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mUgDjk1cmFGa8e0jZjW2VEGbLu_Yabgy/view?usp=sharing