The Principles of Design for Vulnerable Communities: A Research by Design Approach Overrunning the Disciplinary Boundaries

Current changes are making communities, cities, and territories increasingly vulnerable. Urban architectural interventions have the power to intervene this situation, directly reducing vulnerabilities or backing social initiatives. Urban and architectural interventions, however, are also those that take a longer time to be implemented and to impact society. For this, these interventions must be sustained by broad and transversal visions, as well as referring to the temporal context of the coming decades. For these reasons, the research project “Design for Vulnerables” aims to define which methodologies should be adopted to reduce urban vulnerabilities in the coming decades. A design workshop, set in a vulnerable community in the northern Mexico, was organized, documented, and analyzed. Based on the research by design methodology, the research highlighted current issues, transversal to urban-architectural design, which influence urban vulnerabilities. This multidisciplinary approach made it possible to generating a set of principles of Design for Vulnerables, graphically represented by a re-interpretation of the Krebs cycle.