[Un]Real Estate

Today, the value of things and places is coming into question. Traditionally, systems set out by the real estate market has assigned the value of land – however, as exposed by the current economic crises, this value and the way that it is assigned is not stable and can be questioned. While economic, political, and cultural authorities may take charge of the official systems, design might have a role in exposing how these systems are manifested locally and materially, with implications for class and gender, property ownership and social norms, family life and seasonal patterns within a particular building, neighborhood, (sub)urban configuration. Experience design might also be employed to change or re(e)valuate the status and stakeholders in a specific site or situation.

But value can be neither static nor eternal – public spaces have unofficial values, unwritten laws, memory value, norms of belief and behavior, beyond what might be evident from property value or recognition by political or preservation authorities. For example, besides the official environmentalists or preservationists, hunters and taxi drivers have a deep interest and knowledge of the physical and cultural landscape. This raises a range of new questions – how are values created and changed? Who has a role or stake in this? How do values connect to the sensibility/materiality/geography? In a more fluid and emergent notion of ‘value’, other networks of actors and interest-groups have agency, along with other techniques/technologies and alternative forms for materializing and spreading values.

[Un]Real Estate focuses attention on discovering existing ways in which values are set and communicated officially, and unofficially, and about (re)designing systems for altering existing values or introducing new ones. The resulting design proposals should be targeted at specific stakeholders and actors to re-experience the existing from another (persuasive, environmental, humanitarian) perspective.