Bureaucracy / Rhythm / Dyslexia Part 1 Project 2001 Julika Gittner Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) | UK The following 2 projects engage with bureaucracy, rhythm and dyslexia as critical tools in order to analyse and redefine urban as well personal space.The investigation of the spacial impact of planning bureaucracy in London and in India reveals loopholes within the planning process, that create space for free interventions in existing spatial and social structures.THE RHYTHMIC WALKWAYDiscovering dyslexia to be a disability in coordinating time and space, the project understands dyslexic perception as the ability to decipher simultaneious multiple meanings of the urban language. The definition of dyslexia as a disability is used to legaly demand the subversion of the common understanding of city space by introducing rhythm as the mechanism underlying personal orientation.JUPITER MILL RETIREMENT HOMESThe constant pattern of bureaucratic inefficiencies is recognised as the onlypredictable factor in the extremely dense and illegible urban fabric of the city of Ahmedabad, India. The project uses 900 idle workers and 5 million bricks to restructure one of 140 closed former textile mills in a predetermined period of 26 years, using the manipulation of public and private rhythm as a zoning device. The first part of this student's work relied on a loophole within the planning code of the Corporation of London. To address it she set up her own company "Designing for Dyslexia" and promoted a brilliant proposal concerning the redesign and re-evaluation of public infrastructure (which might actually be implemented soon). This company gave her the tools to interact with the City of London on an institutional level and enabled her to use her project as a critical process in regards to the City's planning authorities, the "ideology" inscribed into its code and the financial corporations that it serves.The second part of her work took that process further with an urban proposal for the city of Ahmedabad in India. Her project (exhibited and published in India and under consideration by the local authorities) manages to utilise the local bureaucratical system's own imperfections in a productive way and thereby to produce an urban transformation on a large scale using small scale intervention on the one hand and policy making on the other.The radical visions of her proposals are based on a Faustian thinking: by marrying the demands of the corporate world with public needs new synergies and tensions between traditionally incompatible organisational systems are produced to serve general and emergent needs. The significance of the student's work far surpasses the limitations of a regular student project. By devising a series of proposal Julika interacted with institutions and companies and demonstrated that with intelligence, talent, energy and courage she could influence policies and urban life to bring about change in the city. By that as she claims herself, she would like to open a way for other citizens to do so.