Urban Living Room

POC Urban Living Room

Urban Living Room

Living together in a public space

An open-air kitchen, living room or bedroom, set up in the middle of a public place, encourage people to take break, talk to unknown people that might be living in the same city and even start a conversation about this public space they share but that they don’t pay attention to most of the time…

Urban Living Rooms 

Urban Living Roomsare artistic interventions in the shape of open-air installations in public spaces in the Manastur and Unirii neighbourhoods, in the city of Cluj-Napoca in Roumania. MASS, the collective of architects who imagined this initiative, aim to associate different public places in Cluj to specific domestic spaces. They have installed a living room for people passing by to sit together and chat, a kitchen to eat in open air, a bedroom to rest, etc. The installations suggest the idea that public spaces can be as cherished as their own domestic environments. For a period of 3 weeks, the installations helped these public areas reclaim some attention, areas otherwise forgotten and drowned in daily routines. 

REFILL the city 

REFILL the city is an URBACT Action Planning network of partnering cities including Amersfoort, Athens, Bremen, Cluj, Ghent (lead partner), Helsinki, Nantes, Ostrava, Poznan and Riga. For 3 years, between 2015 and 2018, its goal has been to unite experimented cities with temporary uses and developed tools, such as legislation, funds, financial tools, agencies, networks, digital platforms and so on.

  • Project holders: MASS collective of architects
  • Stakeholders: This case comes from the REFILL The City network co-financed by the European Union through the URBACT programme.
  • Photo credits: MASS collective of architects, POC Urban Living Room