WORKROOM GABROVO

MANAGING SUSTAINABLE EMERGENCY

Challenges and Imperatives
As a mid-sized city in central Bulgaria Gabrovo suffers from a set of challenges typical to many towns of the same size in the country. One major challenge are declining population numbers. As especially young people have left, this results also in demographic problems, an aging society, lack of workforce and ultimately decline in lively urbanity. Industries have turned down, and abandoned private industrial properties can be found in central areas, particularly along the river. Among them are impressive old factories, schools and villas.
There is a lack of legislative regulation to motivate or enforce developments in these areas and as a whole they burden the city. Individual efforts have been taken to revitalize some buildings and spaces, but they are scattered and there is still a dominant impression of a discontinuous urban fabric, which does not yet tell of stabilization. At the same time, on national and international level, sustainable development according to net zero transition goals has become mandatory. Therefore, there is an overriding strategy needed to connect the efforts, leverage synergies and join individual initiatives in a common project.

The Path Forward
Contrary to popular perception, buildings and their environment are not stable, fixed elements in an urban tissue but a process. After a period of degradation an empty shell of a building, space or river bed can’t be turned over and re-inhabited overnight. Functions have to be prototyped, toyed and experimented with, pioneered to look what works, what sticks. In the workshop we look for approaches how culture and an architectural practice of making can open-up spaces for re-definition and appropriation, repurposed and remodeled in an adaptive and inclusive way. It is about the here and now, about truth and reality, about the real and the ordinary, about following the traces of the everyday and the found, and in doing so, advancing towards new insights and spaces.

Facing Gabrovo
In the city there is a strong will for meaningful changes and growth. City administration and political leaders are engaged and have become a motor of change. What is more is, that there is an honest interest in cooperation with central public authorities and private key stakeholders. With a growing experience in projects, that individually seek to support or initiate transition, there is an acknowledged need now to conceptualize urban development on a bigger scale. At the same time, the need to knit together already existing and upcoming elements of hope can be answered through place-making or process strategies. A practice much employed in the city.

Outcomes
The report from the workroom can be used as a reference to showcase how transition can be initiated and choreographed as a process and a new culture of collaboration and co-production can further promote transition in your context. With reference to concrete spaces, opening up and activation, bundling new images in people's minds and making change visible are techniques and strategies we understand and learn from together.

WORKROOM GABROVO

MANAGING SUSTAINABLE EMERGENCY

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