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DESIGN PEOPLE POWERED PLACES Meet the architectur
e firm investigating how to best involve communities in housing and planning Most Dubliners will know that the topic of development is a sensitive one. Organisations like No More Hotels and Give Us The Night frequently protest the loss of cultural spaces in favour of hotels, while local groups are often pursuing legal challenges against new developments in their vicinity. It’s an area laden with strife – yet one Dublin architecture practice is working to forge a new path that promotes innovative methods of community engagement into development processes. Metropolitan Workshop was founded as a vehicle for productive collaboration, consisting of architects, urban planners and designers who are based across both Dublin and London. They have worked on urban design projects such as the Ballymun Regeneration Masterplan, Herberton (formerly Fatima Mansions), Adamstown District Centre, and more. As part of Open House Dublin, Ireland’s largest architecture festival organised by the Irish Architecture Foundation, Metropolitan Workshop will exhibit their latest research project, People Powered Places. I caught up with Ozan Balcik, who has been an architect at the organisation since 2018, to tell me more about the project. “Alongside our regular architecture jobs, which includes large scale affordable housing, estate regeneration and town renewal, we run a series of practice based research projects,” he tells me. The first of these was A New Kind of Suburbia, which was exhibited at Open House Dublin in 2019. The practice-based research programme “was an opportunity to interrogate our understanding of the challenges faced by existing and new suburban residents” and applied design thinking principles to modern suburbia. The COVID-19 pandemic shone new light on their previous research and the team at Metropolitan Workshop felt it was necessary to re-examine their own practices. They set out to study emergent, collective and participatory models in order to find out how to best help communities thrive. After that project, Ozan tells me, “the research team were asking themselves what part of our exist56