Marjetica Potrc is an artist and architect known for working closely with local communities to devise homegrown, sustainable solutions to the daily quality-of-life dilemmas that affect people who live in the world’s city slums. As part of a process she calls “participatory design,” Potrc has spent months immersed in places such as settlements in the Western Balkans to the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela, engaging the knowledge of local people and drawing from existing materials to create designs to improve the living conditions of an individual family or an entire community. Her work is driven by her belief that, “Citizens are the ones who make the city.”

Potrc put her participatory design principles to the test in 2003 when she spent half a year in the barrios of Caracas, where lack of running water is a major challenge. Potrc responded by creating a “dry toilet,” an ecologically sound toilet fabricated entirely from local materials which collects human waste and converts it to fertilizer. Today, Potrc’s dry toilets are a fixture in many homes throughout the barrio.

Last year, Potrc spent two months in New Orleans investigating the revival of the vernacular architecture style known as the “shotgun house” and the city’s efforts to be self-sustained. In collaboration with local residents and the sustainable design consultancy FutureProof, Potrc created an educational exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans that examined how locals are reintroducing the practice of rainwater harvesting, which collects run-off storm-water and diverts it to green areas. The collection and use of rainwater helps restore wetlands, preserve the water table in New Orleans, and prevent flooding. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a fully-functioning 1,500-gallon cistern which will be permanently installed on the roof of the International School in New Orleans to collect rainwater and irrigate a garden on school grounds.

Potrc is as much a social scientist and anthropologist as she is an artist and architect. But she sees herself primarily as a storyteller who breaks conventional boundaries between the worlds of art and design and the makeshift world of so-called “informal cities” by reinterpreting and reconstructing the corrugated tin and cinderblock houses she has seen in her travels as gallery installations and by applying her unique design sensibility to solving everyday problems in cities where infrastructure has broken down.

“I mostly work with communities that live in territories that have broken away from the 20th-century ideology of progress,” Potrc has said. “This gives them the freedom to design things according to their own abilities and on their own scale. Their practices reveal a world that is constructed ‘from below.’”

Marjetica Potrc

Artist and Architect
New York, NY and Ljubljana, Slovenia
Age: 55