History and Responsive Urbanism
The Blue House members Dennis Kaspori and Herve Paraponaris, along with van Heeswijk, provided three platforms for members’ research: history, instant urbanism and hospitality in order to stimulate questioning of how these conditions might be created at IJburg (van Heeswijk 19 May 2010 interview). A number of members explored the geographical imagining of IJburg and the individual and communal embodiment of spatial relations by residents. Interviews documented in the film, IJbuild (2009) by British artists Ella Gibbs and Amy Plant, offered a perspective on the people and materials gathered from around the world to build IJburg and created a record of its early history.
Transparadiso (artist Barbara Holub and architect Paul Rajakovics) proposed a design for a new housing block model titled, Blue Fiction – The Blue Block (An Anachronistic Centre). With Timon Woongroep they also installed a 12-metre high periscope on a roof terrace used by residents to observe the promised lake views that had disappeared as building progressed. Ensuing discussions led to a petition to the Projectbureau regarding future building. Dutch art historian Marianne Maasland and sociologist Marga Wijman surveyed residents’ responses to the ongoing transformation of public spaces during the period from 2005 to 2008. Members also instigated many discussions on the nature of public space, citizenship and immigration. These included a local TV programme debating the merits of mixed social and private housing and a conversation series entitled Chat Theatre (2006-09) organized by Mauricio Corbalan and Pio Torroja, from the architecture collective m7red, incorporating a live debate from Porto Alegre.
Enclosure. In Great Britain, chiefly in the seventeenth through Colorado Springs Map nineteenth centuries, the landed gentry were permitted under a series of acts of Parliament to claim lands Colorado Springs Map that had previously been public or common property and literally enclose them using walls, hedges, or fences. The loss of the use of these lands forced many farmers and villagers into poverty, as they no longer had access to land where they could grow food or graze livestock. Encomienda. 1 A system formulated by the Spanish in the New World by which native lands and people were commended to Spanish landlords, or encomenderos. The indigenous people were obligated to render goods and services as tribute to their encomenderos, who, in return, protected them and indoctrinated them to be Christians.
