A Caring Confrontation: Re-Ordering as a Design Research Strategy Toward a Circular City

Abstract

Entering a “re- era” in which cities use available resources again and again requires developing and testing new “re- strategies.” This article elaborates “re-ordering”: a redirecting of the flow of residual concrete pavement stones using time as a structuring element. In a two-year design research project, through a “bisociation” of design practices and urban/municipal practices in Rotterdam, different types of knowledge and skills confronted each other. Not in a head-on collision, but rather in the form of a “caring confrontation” that allows for operating in different contexts, in a variety of places and with a variety of people, products and protocols.