Remittances, global Barcelona

Informal 2.0
Remittances, global Barcelona
group project, Metropolis Masters in Architecture and Urban Culture, 2010
Instructor: Laura Kurgan
Co-Director, Spatial Information Design Lab Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

Migrants from poor countries send home about $300 billion a year. This is more than three times the global total in foreign aid, making 'remittances' the main source of outside money flowing to the developing world." (New York Times, November 18th, 2007) Approximately 150 million people remitted money at an average cost of $200 per year in 2007 (1). This workshop examined the pathways, institutions, and built products of the informal global trade in money. How is the movement of money manifested locally, and in what forms, in urban centers worldwide? The Raval district of Barcelona was our laboratory for experiments with this phenomenon, and we used visual, analytic, and design tools to understand the flexible forms and institutions that emerge with informal patterns of global migration. Rather than reaffirming the common presumption that the West or the developed world establishes institutions which dominate the developing world, we documented and responded to the reverse trend, in which the developing world establishes new patterns in its host cities, Euro by Euro, person by person, often in an ad hoc, makeshift, unapparent ways. Our work will be provisional, since this is a massive, still growing, dynamic global network of physical, informational, and institutional spaces.
As a group we made use of new web-based user-driven software, FLCKR RSS Feeds, and Google API’s, to explore the ways in which new toolkits enable non-experts to create maps and populate them with all sorts of information, and in doing this discover new possibilities for participation, interaction, critique, creation, and dissidence.

http://www.columbia.edu/~ljk33/Site/PS.html