Follow the Witch - The interior designer as a future urban planner for the design between existing walls

Sammanfattning: What if most of our future buildings are already built? To build new buildings by claiming new resources and more land, these are habits we need to change if we are serious about shifting to a sustainable way of living. We need to deal with what has already been built. We have to reorganise the urban functions without big interventions to the urban plan, and instead transform the function and core of already built structures. This means that my own profession, interior designer, must become a profession dealing with urbanity, systems and larger scale. In my project I argue for the necessity of the interior designer taking an active role in urban planning processes, by bringing in an established practice for designing between existing walls. In my study, I provide an overview of urban planning by looking at examples of where interior design has entered the urban planning process and shaped it. I show aspects of narration and architectural criticism through feminist methodology, to deconstruct our current habits and views on how we plan and build. My research started with semi-structured interviews with both urban planners and interior designers to map the two professions. By putting these two professions in conversation with eachother, I aim to highlight their current issues and how they can respond to them in a collaborative way. I have explored these issues by posing the following questions: How can the interior designer become an active actor in urban planning processes? What can community building and city planning gain from interior design and urban design exchanging tools and practises when tackling issues regarding sustainability and our built environment? Based on these conversations, I have entered an extruded figure ground plan where we encounter different types of actors and objects that set the urban plan in motion. The urban plan orbits around a pool house in Uddevalla, which serves as a case-study for a type of building in great transformation in today’s Sweden.