Base Camp: A Pop-Up Culture

Base Camp: A Pop-Up Culture

There is a 5-year integrated urban renewal plan happening in the Northern part of København. Base Camp is designed to work cooperatively with residents of the area in renewal. Base Camp will run a comprehensive development process during the spring/summer months in København over the next three years in preparation for the completion of the alpha-anchoring phase at the end of August of 2015.
Base Camp enables actions that can manifest between people and space and looks for opportunities to challenge the uses or misuses of derelict urban spaces. The project will facilitate a resident-led, mixed-use public space that produces valuable grassroots overlaps for a user produced cultural playground. The overarching concept is a cooperatively created platform that catalyzes user culture in a specific derelict public space at the Northern Gate of København called Hans Knudsens Plads (HKP). Once the alpha phase is completed the development team will boil down the Base Camp concept into an autonomous resident cultural format that can be disseminated elsewhere as a public space tool-kit.

HKP is an important and interesting area in the Northern part of Copenhagen, as it is the Northern Gate of the city and lies on a main København transportation artery. For commuters, it is the first and last thing they see, and for residents within close proximity, HKP is a loud, ugly, shadowed, boring, and unused public space that often is only used for pedestrians. Base Camp will be tailored to several diverse user demographics and encourage authorship through pop-ups, temporary actions, and revolving events.

To kick off Base Camp in Alpha season 1 in the summer of 2013 we will demarcate predetermined spaces for rent with designed module components made from beer crates to illustrate a vision of what assets the space holds. This will act as a point of departure for the public to participate in their space and propose how the space will function for the following three months. The designed module components will evolve over the three seasons of the project moving from modular components evolving into a larger temporary structure. The mainstay of the program will be a rationing station which will issue an interactive user guide to Base Camp, a listing of the planned pop-ups that will be taking place during the exhibition, re-mixed local maps, and a call for proposals for residents to create their own pop-up. Alongside the rationing station, the Base Camp team will help the residents author their own pop-up culture by putting the pen in their hands, offering workshops and conferences to local residents on some of the following topics: building temporary mobile structures for pop-up shops, creating social economies, the re-evaluation of urban space, and contemporary grass roots guerilla marketing, entrepreneurship, and networking.

We feel this is a diverse and comprehensive approach to re-appropriating and re-interpreting public space as place.