Mejk po Naszemu: Weaving Collective Life

Mejk po naszemu is an inquiry into how collective life is produced, sustained, and negotiated through everyday urban environments.

The project is situated in Załęże, a district of Katowice, Poland, where Gliwicka Street forms the main spatial armature of the neighbourhood. Connected by tram lines and intersected by different rhythms of movement, the street reveals a landscape marked by the everyday practices of those who inhabit it.

Walking through Załęże, I observed a strong culture of making: residents adapting spaces, reusing materials, extending thresholds, and creating small interventions that respond to daily needs. These practices became the foundation of the project, understood as existing forms of knowledge embedded within the neighbourhood.

The project approaches Załęże through a triadic framework: the urban fabric, the social fabric, and making as a social practice.

These interconnected dimensions are understood as threads within a loom — sometimes crossing, overlapping, and supporting one another; sometimes loosening and creating space for new connections.

The urban fabric reveals where movement and interaction accumulate. The social fabric traces the networks of people, activities, and institutions that already shape everyday life. Making practices reveal the knowledge, skills, and acts of adaptation through which residents continuously engage with their surroundings.

Together, these threads form the basis for identifying where existing relations can be strengthened.

Inspired by Christopher Alexander’s understanding of patterns and Bill Hillier’s work on spatial relations, the project began with a reading of thresholds — liminal spaces along the street exhibiting varying degrees of social cohesion.

Social cohesion is understood as the capacity of space to support repeated, informal encounters — the small, everyday exchanges through which relationships form. Following Alexander, recurring spatial patterns are read as indicators of deeper social structures, while Hillier’s work highlights how spatial arrangements shape visibility, encounter, and exchange.

On Gliwicka Street in Załęże, thresholds appear at multiple scales and intensities, often through subtle adaptations that transform edges into social spaces.

One example is the interface between a small grocery shop and the sidewalk. A canopy extends over the pavement, with crates and temporary displays spilling outward. The shop extends beyond its interior, creating a gradual shift between inside and street. Movement, browsing, and brief exchanges unfold within this layered edge.

Its significance lies in its adaptability: elements shift through the day in response to weather and use. Social life emerges not from fixed form, but from continuous adjustment and care.

The sidewalk remains public, yet is temporarily shaped by everyday practices, making the threshold a negotiated and evolving space of encounter.

These thresholds hold multiple readings — as spaces of movement and exchange. Their capacity to support everyday interactions demonstrates how spatial ordering directly shapes the forms of social life it enables.

Gliwicka Street is understood as a woven spatial field: where some areas are tightly woven through movement and activity, while others loosen and fray. The aim was to understand where new connections could strengthen the existing structure of this weave. 

Rather than treating every empty space as a hole in the fabric, these are understood as areas of lower density, where the spatial logic is less active but still present. The focus is therefore on identifying where new relations could be woven across the field in order to strengthen the loom further.

To understand the networks already present in Załęże, the project developed a stakeholder mapping of everyday activities, institutions, and forms of exchange.

Commercial anchors, civic institutions, schools, and making practices reveal a network of relationships that shape the neighbourhood. This mapping showed that making is already deeply embedded within the area — both through formal practices such as repair workshops and through informal everyday making practices.

The analysis also explored the rhythms of the street, tracing how spaces transform throughout the day. A single threshold can become a place of exchange, waiting, gathering, or passing depending on the time and the people using it.

The chosen site emerged from this reading: a location where different threads of movement, activity, and making already intersect, but with a lower intensity of connection. The intention is to strengthen selected threads and introduce a framework that facilitates encounters between different stakeholders, allowing everyday practices to overlap and become more tightly entangled within the existing spatial field.

The project is grounded in the idea of Mejk po naszemu — making in a local way.

Making is understood not simply as fabrication, but as a socially embedded practice through which people exchange knowledge and shape their environment.

Across Załęże, reused materials, improvised furniture, layered boundaries, and adapted spaces reveal a culture of working with what is available. These everyday acts demonstrate an existing intelligence of making — one that is practical, collective, and rooted in place.

Making is therefore approached as both a philosophy and a practice, where “making-do” becomes a spatial logic in itself: a continuous negotiation with available resources, constraints, and immediate needs. This is evident in the way makeshift furniture is assembled, how surplus materials are repurposed into informal boundaries, or how bricks from demolished buildings are reused to demarcate space. These acts produce visually layered thresholds, where spatial conditions are not fixed but accumulated over time, often revealed in sequences of adaptation and use. Rather than isolated interventions, they form an ongoing system of incremental adjustments that shape the character of everyday space.

Hence, the project asks how architecture can create conditions for these practices to meet, expand, and continue.

An Extended Threshold

The proposal combines an urban workshop with a tram stop, creating an extended threshold between Gliwicka Street and the tram line running north. The tram stop is introduced as a new infrastructural layer, positioning the site within an established and continuous rhythm of movement. In contrast to the more diffuse spatial conditions along this part of Gliwicka Street, introducing a new tram stop creates a consistent flow of pedestrians and commuters, strengthening connectivity and drawing activity back into the area. Hence, working with a double program was key here, in order to respond directly to the multi-layered reading of Załęże’s spatial fabric.

The act of making is foregrounded as the central programmatic driver. The workshop is not a singular function, but an urban collective — a makerspace, repair lab, and learning environment where residents, school children, makers, architects, and educators can meet through shared practices of making and knowledge exchange.

The design language of the workshop is informed by the reading of the socio-urban fabric and local making practices. The sequence of the workshop spaces is arranged as a continuous field that can operate as a whole or in parts, depending on intensity of use. When activity is low, spaces can be selectively activated; when collective use increases, the entire workshop opens into a continuous making landscape. Visual and spatial continuity allows views across workshops, reinforcing a sense of shared production.

This logic is expressed through folding panels, retractable doors, and operable openings, directly referencing the everyday spatial adaptations already present in Załęże: retractable canopies, temporary street extensions, crates placed outside shops, and spaces continuously assembled and disassembled through use. In the same way, the workshop is designed as a temporal structure — one that shifts between openness and enclosure, stability and adjustment.

Certain workshops extend outward into deck-like platforms with light fabric canopies, activating the edge towards the green space. In summer, these extensions expand the working field into the landscape, reinforcing continuity between making and environment. The placement of the workshop also acts as a catalyst for the adjacent green space, which is reinterpreted as an extension of the repair garden and a space of informal production and gathering.

At the end of the sequence, the repair garden and DIY prototype workshop function as a testing ground for small-scale interventions. Here, new spatial elements are developed collectively and reintroduced into the neighbourhood as distributed satellite actions. The workshop therefore operates as an anchor: it gathers activity in one place while enabling it to extend outward through tools, trolleys, and mobile systems of making.

The role of the architect is not to design these interventions, but to construct the infrastructural framework that allows them to emerge. The workshop provides the tools, spatial systems, and conditions through which collective intelligence already present in the neighbourhood can be mobilised and extended. This is made operational through a trolley system, where interventions produced in the workshops are transported back into the neighbourhood. A dedicated loading and movement zone at the rear of the building enables this circulation. This movement introduces an additional everyday pattern, further interweaving the workshop into existing practices within the site.

Hence, the building operates as a weaving reed: a device that organises movement, making, and encounter into a continuous field. The tram line anchors movement, the workshop intensifies making, and together they interweave everyday urban life with collective production while reinforcing existing patterns.

The workshop operates as an urban collective: a place for knowledge exchange, prototyping, and collaboration.

A system of trolleys allows making to move beyond the building, carrying workshops and locally produced interventions back into Gliwicka Street and the surrounding neighbourhood.

The project therefore does not position the workshop as an isolated object, but as an anchor within a wider network — strengthening connections between existing practices, people, and spaces.

Ultimately, Mejk po naszemu is less about introducing a new layer into Załęże, and more about reinforcing the threads already woven into its everyday life. The workshop becomes a platform where knowledge, movement, and making can continue to shape the neighbourhood together.