Toward a Critical Practice of Preservation of Rural Identity

While the major cities in Denmark are experiencing growth in population and economy, the surrounding rural areas face abandoned villages and increasing decay.
This research focuses on the abandoned houses, seeking an alternative to today’s state funded demolition programmes. These programmes are often carried out en masse without anyone questioning the consequences of loss of material and immaterial values such as cultural heritage, building density and local narratives. By way of contrast, this research seeks to establish a new critical practice based on a series of full-scale transformations of abandoned buildings. The aim of the transformations is to develop and test full-scale prototypes in rural environments. Interaction with local people and their response to the prototypes can be seen as real life peer reviewing and is considered an important impact indicator and supplement to the physical transformations. The prototypes vary in achievement and in timeframe.
Nine transformations have already been carried out in order to disclose embedded hidden values in interaction with local communities. Contrary to common practice, the present research began with full-scale transformations of abandoned buildings and engaging with local inhabitants as a feedback mechanism. Later on it extended into the strategic planning level by engaging politicians.