TBI: The youth, the City and the Heritage

How can young people co-design life and space in the city? How can their influence grow from creating smaller safe havens to co-designing large city spaces – with ambitious, long-term sustainable ideas? The exhibition TBI: Youth, City and Heritage, combined with a series of talks and lectures tries to answer these questions and shows a referential example of bottom-up urbanism, from youth to those wielding the power and encourages reflection on the past design practices related to space on multiple levels.

The exhibition is an expression of the results of the international urban planning workshop TBI: Youth, City and Heritage, which has been exploring challenges, urban planning development and the revitalization of industrial heritage that the younger generations now face in the town of Idrija (UNESCO World Heritage Site). The exhibition also explores the divide between the creators and users of said spaces, with an emphasis on the role of the local community's younger generations.

At the workshops, students of architecture, sociology, marketing and urban studies were supported by the Faculty of Architecture of the University in Ljubljana, the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana, the municipality of Idrija, the Romanian architectural think tank Plusminus, the community of Idrija 2020 and the Youth centre Idrija, where they were introduced to the challenges associated with working in international interdisciplinary teams. The results of the project took the form of a vision for the city’s development and the development of projects and interventions in different spaces, as well as an opportunity to take part in interdisciplinary collaboration, which is always celebrated yet often left out.