A City for Everyone

Can a city be for everyone? Can it orient its specifically urban infrastructure more towards care than towards short-term prestige limited to the length of an electoral term? Could we even imagine a city as an instrument capable of mitigating the impacts of economic inequality among its inhabitants and contributing to a better world that does not discriminate or segregate, but creates space for protection and assistance? The book City for Everyone? Uncovering the Infrastructure of Segregation is based on interdisciplinary engaged research conducted between 2020 and 2022, within which a case study was produced on a so-called excluded locality in Veľký Krtíš, a small district town in south-eastern Slovakia. This multi-layered publication, whose form and content reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the team’s work, is intended both as a contribution to the discussion on research methodology in segregated localities — whether framed within social science or design discourse — and as a stimulus to general debate on social housing, a topic long neglected in Slovak public policy. RUVK is a research team composed of designers, architects, social scientists, a social housing expert and a lawyer, whose members are based at the Faculty of Fine Arts (FFA) of BUT,the Faculty of Arts (FF) and the Faculty of Science (PřF) at Masaryk University (MUNI) in Brno. The team has been working in the area in various configurations since 2018. The primary aim of the team’s long-term work has been, and remains, to improve the social and material conditions of housing in this area, represented by a specific apartment block owned by the Town of Veľký Krtíš. Through a forensic approach to the terrain of the excluded RUVK site, the project demonstrates how the spatio-temporal layers of segregation are superimposed upon one another, shedding new light on suspected but not explicitly articulated practices of segregation. Often latent or even hidden, they have deep roots embedded in the social and economic structure of cities. The case studied by RUVK is described in this book as a gradual unravelling of these layers of the so-called ‘infrastructure of segregation’. However, RUVK views its work in this locality not merely as research but also as intervention. Team members assisted residents in reporting housing defects to the town as the landlord and also in submitting a complaint to the Public Defender of Rights. Following the mass termination of tenancy agreements by the Town of Veľký Krtíš in September 2020, which affected approximately 130 people, including 70 children, one of the team members worked intensively on a daily basis in the apartment block for four months. RUVK also sought to connect local organisations with the aim of strengthening capacities for outreach social work and affordable housing in the area. In 2021, for example, it assisted a local non-profit organisation in submitting a project under the Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs and Family’s ‘Affordable Housing with Housing First Elements’ call for proposals, which the organisation continues to successfully implement in Veľký Krtíš to this day. The book also comes with a card game called ‘Care from the Future’, a redesign of the game by Situation Lab originally titled ‘Thing From The Future’. The redesign was carried out by the RUVK team. The principle of the game is to seek solutions from the perspective of a local government representative. These solutions should benefit otherwise neglected groups of both human and non-human actors in the city.