The city of Social Change and the Refugee City: Reimagining the Reno Pontoon

This paper involves an in-depth study of the story of the Reno prison boat for the asylum seekers and presents an re-imagination of this boat as a Heterotopic Space in the framework of an international architectural design studio. Inspired by Foucault’s "Of Other Spaces", this proposal attempts to rethink the Reno Pontoon as a counter-site, a kind of effectively enacted utopia covering alternative urban practices and sites which can be found within the city of Ghent. Instead of isolating refugees in a segregated space, it aims to achieve a social hyper-mix and accommodate interactions between the different groups of the society. The affordances and challenges of the proposal are discussed in relation to the introduced background; leading to the distillation of a set of design strategies for addressing the refugee crisis. In addition, the educational benefits and difficulties of the studio task are scrutinized from the perspectives of the coordinators and students.status: publishe