Building Locality in a Global Neighborhood: Community Process in Geneva’s IFRC Park

When the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Geneva, Switzerland, decided to modernize its campus in 2019, its leadership saw an opportunity to embody the organization’s humanitarian principles and better connect to the surrounding neighborhood—both spatially and socially. This desire drove the unconventional selection of urbz as the lead designer of the partially gated 3.2-acre campus, known as the IFRC Park. 

urbz is an international design, engagement and research collective that focuses on participatory urban planning, governance, and architecture. Founded in 2008 in Mumbai’s Dharavi neighborhood, the urbz design practice was shaped by the context out of which it grew. Dharavi is widely considered India’s largest slum and one of the most densely populated communities in the world with nearly one million people in 0.92 square miles. urbz sees Dharavi not as a slum but as a “homegrown” place that is collaboratively and spontaneously generated from the bottom up by its end-users over time, where community-building is often more social than built, in part due to resource and space constraints.  

As urbz has expanded over the past sixteen years, opening offices in Paris, Bogotá, and Geneva, their engagement philosophy and prioritization of process over built form has remained consistent and makes their approach highly distinctive among design practices. Our case study considers the measures of success and weakness of urbz’s unique approach in a range of different design situations through close examination and analysis of the IFRC Park design process. We identify the opportunities where urbz’s processes are likely to have the most impact: those where social design is critical to transforming perception of physical, cultural and relational assets to build a collective sense of place and desire to work together; where place-keeping, community-building, stewardship and discovery of shared common projects is what a community most desires.