Why TReC?
‘The Responsive City’, TReC [2008] is a network of designers, artists and scientists with loose ties who live in Amsterdam, Istanbul, Cairo and London. Our work falls into the cross-section of architecture, urban design, planning, game design and governance. We develop city games to generate design and planning scenarios.
Common interest of the network is perceiving cities as self-organizing systems. Cities are always subject to processes where simple realities end up in complex urban situations regardless of specific political and socio-economic conditions. Shrinking cities of Eastern Germany, growing informal settlements as in Accra or Buenos Aires, mushrooming gated communities at the peripheries of Istanbul are all subjects of systems theory.
As TReC, we have been developing a special eye for analyzing such open and complex urban systems. We not only analyze but also propose strategies and tactics to deal with such urban processes.
Currently we are forming the PLAY the CITY foundation to make space for researching and applying city design games in the real-time making of cities. Precise application of new media and social networks are an inevitable part of this process.
Who works with TReC?
*TReC focuses on cities from the Middle East, Balkans as well as European cities influenced by migration from the East.
*TReC works for city governments to develop city visions and strategies.
*TReC works with NGO’s neighborhood organizations to help develop their visions about their neighborhoods [Citymine[d]/BRUSSELS, Gulensu Neighborhood Organization/ISTANBUL].
*TReC works with universities, urban institutes and academies bringing in new education methods of approaching and designing cities, such as ‘city design games’ [TU Delft/NL, INTI/NL, Rotterdam Academy/NL, Bilgi University/ISTANBUL, Mimar Sinan University/ISTANBUL].