Anders Berensson Architects has designed an urban development project in the Swedish town of Tibro, called “Tibro Train Tracks” seeing the abandoned train track area as a potential arena for urban experiments.

The project has resulted in 60 fast photomontages, 16 inventories of local producers, 17 urban projects and proposals and 1 urban plan proposal for the abandoned train track. The one year project has been divided into three parallel phases.

Phase 1 is a citizen dialogue starting with 60 fast photomontages from grand nature wonders and big buildings to more modest proposals of playgrounds and public toilets encouraging people to do their own proposals. The process led to over 300 proposals from the citizens that has then been read carefully and analyzed into diagrams. This information has then been translated into a grid plan allowing a spontaneous slow growth of what the citizens asked for.

In Phase 2 we visited 16 local companies, schools and associations trying to map unique local resources in town. The mapping focused mainly on the furniture industry of the town trying to find out what architecture that could be locally produced in unique site specific projects.

In Phase 3 the information from the dialogue and the inventory was combined into a ”smorgasbord” of 17 proposals, prototypes and projects to fill the train track area with based on what the citizens want and what the local industries are able to manufacture.

The practice based research project has been funded by the city of Tibro and ArkDes (Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design) to investigate new methods of urban planning connected to the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The project focuses its research on SDG number 11 trying to connect a participatory design with career and business opportunities in a plan with a resilient strategy.

For a more detailed description please read the full story on our homepage: http://andersberenssonarchitects.com/work/tibro-train-tracks/