VISIONS OF DEVELOPMENT OF KING'S ROUTE IN GDAŃSK
Student Project
Długa Street and Długi Targ are part of the King’s Route and make up the very heart of the historic Free City of Gdańsk. The City Council decided to carry out not only the necessary infrastructural repairs but also to adapt the space to the needs of a contemporary and future user.
Our faculty was asked by the city officials to tackle this challenge during our Urban Design Studio classes. The result of our work is a publication of a report containing in-depth analysis of the space and possible directions of development for this prestigious location.
Our report is a source of information and recommendations for the future designers of the King’s Route, who will be chosen in a tender or competition.
The final version of our collaborative work has been published by the Municipality Office - please follow link below if you would like to know more.
organization
Class was led by Monika Arczyńska, PhD and Łukasz Pancewicz, PhD. During the semester the whole group of 34 students (including students from abroad from Erasmus exchange program) worked together as a single architectural office. We were divided into sub-groups - each team responsible for a specific aspect of the project.
These teams were:
• Urban Planning Team,
• Architecture Team,
• Heritage Team,
• Social Team,
• Info Team for graphic design,
• Glue Team for managing and helping us with communication between the teams.
I myself were responsible for the organization of a prototyping event in addition to the standard means of analysis andtogether with two colleagues wrote the architectural analysis and Guidelines chapter of the report, which contains hard solutions for the space.
Social research
An entire team was tasked with addressing the complex issue of the social sphere and its role in the transformation of this space.
We researched the needs and preferences of many user groups. This was achieved by creating a “persona” for each of them. Such visualization of a user and an attempt to identify his/her needs or problems was a our basis for further analysis.
Based on the information gathered through interviews, street surveys, public consultations, meeting in the seniors’ club, observations and internet questionnaires, we were able to create users’ profiles presented in the final section of this chapter. This led us to a better understanding of the street character, important aspects of it in the eyes of its users and their expectations for the development activities.
