TU Wien
Town as Dispersed Hotel – Bale in Istria
€15,00
After decades of a booming tourism industry with devastating impact on territories and economies all over the world, are there smaller-scale, non-intrusive ways of tourism? The compact stone-built town of Bale in Istria, managed to avoid countless forms of European coastal devastation and thus sets the potential to rethink the town itself as a polygon for a locally-oriented alternative in the form of a specific dispersed hotel. The design studio pursues the ongoing development of nanotourism as a creative critique of the current environmental, social and economic downsides of conventional tourism, by offering a participatory, locally oriented, bottom-up alternative. By understanding and identifying the site-specific cultural, historical, material and social stratums of Bale the design studio aims to integrate and recompose these notions within the tangible design project. How can the nanotourist principles of bottom-up, participation, community and environmental responsibility drive this critical yet progressive design approach to rethink the organisation and experience of the town as an accommodation territory?