ABSTRACT
This workshop tasked its participants with the simple but complex question: If the early 21st century can be characterised as a time of resistance to the climate emergency, how can the built-environment respond to these ongoing challenges? The ‘Reuse Imaginary’ was a phrase that was used to describe, on one hand, the bigger claim of prioritising the re-use of the existing over excessive forms of consumption, waste, and discarding. On the other hand, it wanted to ground the project by tasking the students to observe and analyse what was very close to hand. Therefore, the workshop tasked participants to filter their responses through the lens of their own domestic environment(s). The Reuse Imaginary was a workshop that claimed the fact that in response to a world with finite resource, the very-near future of the built environment will be focussed solely on the re-designation of all existing matter. New-build and single-use processes will soon become obsoleted distinctions for making cities, buildings, and interiors and, instead, reusing the existing site, with its matter already in situ, will provide all of the material for the appropriation of the existing to remake something anew. Re-using requires pedagogic innovations, methods of unpacking complexities regarding authorship, processes of understanding contingencies, and ways of reworking what is extant. The Reuse Imaginary set out to test some of these ideas.
