Germany

"Unlocking the inner child" portrays the everyday difficulties of Sophia, who, due to her ADHD diagnosis, sometimes has problems letting her energy run free in an urban environment. That's why she likes to come to the trampolines at the harbour to exercise between her work and other commitments. Here she can live out her inner child and feel free. Leah Meinhof directed, shot and edited the film. Sophia Livecchi tells her personal story.

Azerbaijan

The film addresses the issue of the lack of green public spaces in Azerbaijan. Young people usually struggle to find peaceful and clean areas for their leisure time and tend to visit kilometers away from Baku to “escape” the gray scene of it. Also, Baku is surrounded by beautiful coastal areas, however, due to the mismanagement and lack of state responsibility, these spaces are usually full of trash and not taken care of at all. Although, it is cleaned regularly, even around the center you could see people irresponsibly trashing the streets. Psychologically, it is proven that contact with nature and green scenery helps people a lot to relax and sustain a better mental state. Unfortunately, Baku is a very gray city. It even worsens with time when authority is given to those with resources and connections to cut down more green areas to build their private property. We need to preserve and take care of the minimal green areas we have left in Baku and the film addresses its importance.

Switzerland

Unlike the promises of modernity in design, a single solution fulfills no one's wish. Even if all of us live in the same city under the same environment, everyone is different. Each one of us has individual voices filled with different needs and wants. However, in cities full of modernist structures across the globe, individual differences or cultural uniqueness can no longer be seen. Can design provide a space for uniqueness? Can every citizen be represented equally in a collective space? Instead of alienating ourselves in this concrete habitat, can we re-learn from nature and cultural expressions?" This film speaks for providing people opportunities to design our future knowing the importance of belonging, of nature, of community and connection. Instead of learning from standardized modernist practices full of concrete and computer programs, we need to learn from our past, from nature, and from our own hands. In order to let everyone's voice be heard, we need to first create a space that enables us to embrace our differences in its design.

USA

The assumption that all people are able to actualize the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of citizenship within the built environment is misleading. African Americans’ ownership of property and use of public space for personal enjoyment has been historically perceived as transgressive behavior, and often met with punitive legal action, violence, and, at times, death. Given this context, the ability of African Americans to successfully navigate and shape the physical spaces within their lives has amounted to de facto survival strategies. Addressing this fraught social-spatial condition and its impact at the scale of the citizen, Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line), an intervention in the courtyard of the US Pavilion, is rooted in the historical spatial practices of African Americans, yet speculates upon new spatial strategies that support the most precarious of populations. We foreground these practices as manifestations of civic agency and freedom that move all citizens beyond mere survival toward thrival and full participation in the democratic ideal.

USA

The film aims to repurpose 2000 acres of underperforming and marginalized land for shared timber farming to enact a more adequate synergistic relationship (socio-economically and environmentally) between the built space and the fragmented Hudson Valley’s forest. In Hudson Valley, most of the trees are privately owned, growing on land at the fringe of urban development- Wildland Urban Intermix (WUI). Tackling the large-scale U.S. monopoly of engineered-timber products, the project envisions a bottom-up timber economy- a vertically integrated, resilient timber supply chain- as a way to incentivize private landowners to sustainably manage their own forests while directly accessing a shared infrastructure of researching, harvesting, manufacturing, and retail, waste-recycling, and branding for their timber product. By creating shared collaborative infrastructure for local forest and small-timber-business owners and entrepreneurs, new social partnerships and equally-distributed amenities will be created, boosting local economies while preserving the local and regional forest ecologies. By sustaining long-term forest-plant-based economic development through this shared co-op system, Hudson Valley’s scaled-down timber industry will be funneled while a more socially adequate distribution of profits between diverse communities will be achieved. Composed of four entities, the Center for Resilient Forestry, which is clustered with Wood Innovation Facilities, the Certification Centers, the Sawmill and Distribution Center with additional facilities for Recycling and Storage and Renewable Energy Generation, this project provides a lasting infrastructure that promotes a holistic framework for profitable and sustainable timber agroforestry that ensures the wellbeing of both the forest and its inhabitants.

Azerbaijan

ARCHITECT IS A MEDIATOR BETWEEN PEOPLE AND ARCHITECTURE / FILM SHOWS IT EXPRESSLY STRAIGHT P.S makes places usable by everyone, regardless of age, ability and circumstance.