Design Impact: Places Left Behind Vol. 3

Reimagining the “Left Behind”: Publicness, Materiality, and the Outward Forms of Olot, Spain

How can design reactivate places often perceived as peripheral or “left behind”? In this case study, Zenovia Toloudi explores the civic and spatial culture of Olot, a small Catalan city whose architectural influence extends far beyond its size. Drawing on research into publicness and public space, the talk examines how architecture can cultivate sociability, encounter, and collective meaning through material, environmental, and urban forms. Featuring projects by RCR Arquitectes, Un Parell d’Arquitectes, and Studio Bayona, the presentation highlights how small cities can model ecological stewardship, cultural participation, and civic imagination while reshaping relationships between local identity and global relevance in practice.

Future History of Disappeared Ground: Inherited Water

Tangier Island, Virginia, is one of the last inhabited islands in the Chesapeake Bay—and one of the most visibly threatened by sea-level rise, erosion, and subsidence. Shaped by geographic isolation, intergenerational watermen culture, religious life, and deep dependence on the Bay, Tangier is a place where identity, livelihood, kinship, and landscape remain inseparable.

This project examines how disappearing ground challenges the American idea of land as stable property: something that can be measured, marked, maintained, inherited, and recorded. On Tangier, residents continue to inscribe ownership through everyday acts of care—mowing, fencing, filling, repairing, and remembering—even as the physical land beneath those claims erodes into water.

Through drawing, archival research, and speculative design, this case study asks what happens when property outlives the ground it depends on. Rather than framing Tangier only through loss or retreat, this project explores how design might document the cultural practices of a community facing disappearance and reimagine inherited land as inherited water.

Filling the Gaps

There are moments when the way we design our communities is thrown into crisis. We advocate for the common good, for holistic, human-centered, and sustainable solutions—yet when our territories are struck by sudden shock or chronic stress, our capacity to respond through design is put to the test. This is especially true for those of us in leadership roles or positions of public responsibility, charged with planning and shaping resilient recovery and reconstruction after disaster.

In February 2010, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake and tsunami struck the central coast of Chile, affecting 25% of the national population. It remains the sixth most powerful earthquake in recorded history. More than 150 cities and towns were devastated. And while the government delivered a robust and timely physical reconstruction response, fifteen years on, many of the deeper lessons remain unlearned.

This presentation tells the story of Recupera Chile, a recovery initiative rooted in the fishing community of Dichato. Despite the measurable success of the physical reconstruction led by public authorities, beneath the bricks and concrete, a different kind of recovery was quietly taking shape: one driven from within the community itself. It was a process built on the understanding that emotional, cultural, and economic recovery matters more than material reconstruction; that before rebuilding the docks, we needed to help children stop fearing the sea. That fishermen needed to become stewards of the sea, not just its harvesters. And that design, in the end, is not merely construction—it is construction charged with meaning.