Repurposing Infrastructure for New Use

Reprogramming The City is a global catalyst to explore how cities can employ adaptive reuse and repurposing infrastructure for new use – to do more with the structures and systems they already have. It is a catalyst of ideas, projects and ways in which existing urban structures, surfaces and systems are being re-imagined, re-purposed and re-invented to do more in the city.

Reprogramming the City has most recently been released as a book, available here.

Each Reprogramming the City project is created specifically for the host city and region. It is part catalyst and idea lab for new projects, and an exhibition of some of the best ideas being prototyped around the world.

Repurposing infrastructure for new use — Reprogramming the City Exhibition in Oslo at DOGA, Architecture and Design Norway.

The video below created during Reprogramming the City’s time at the Danish Architecture Centre, Copenhagen, provides a good overview of the project.

The exhibition and workshop series is an illustration of my belief that the city holds a vast amount of untapped ability. The structures, surfaces, objects and systems that underpin its daily operations have the potential to do more, to perform an alternate function, or assume an entirely new role in the mechanism of the city. Reprogramming the City re-contextualizes the hardware of the city as a platform of opportunity – repurposing infrastructure and seeing the city not as the end result of a previous creative process, but the beginning of a new one.

The latest version of Reprogramming the City appeared at DOGA, Design and Architecture Norway in Oslo. Previous versions of Reprogramming the City have been created for Arkdes, Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design in Stockholm, Sweden, the Danish Architecture Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark, the Branch Museum for Design and Architecture in Richmond, and the Boston Society of Architects’ BSA Space Gallery.

Complete information on Reprogramming the City can be found on the project website here.

Below is a selection of Reprogramming the City exhibitions and engagements held in various cities and countries, inspiring people to think how the city’s existing structures, surfaces and systems can be repurposed and re-imagined to do more for the city and its people. Repurposing infrastructure turns the urban landscape into a platform of possibility.