En Dublin en el workshop “Going Smart and Accessible in Public Services and Cities”

La Digital Agenda Assembly 2013 se celebra este año en Dublin organizada por la presidencia de turno irlandesa de la Comisión Europea. La sesión plenaria se celebra el 20 de junio y el día anterior tendrán lugar una serie de seminarios sobre diferentes temáticas relacionadas con la sociedad digital en las diferentes vertientes que cubre la Comisión, desde las competencias digitales para el empleo y en la educación hasta la promoción de diferentes vectores tecnológicos relacionados.

En este marco se celebra el seminario Going smart and sccessible in public services and cities en el que Elena Pedone, de la DG Connect, ha tenido la amabilidad de invitarme a participar. Así que estaré por Dublín la próxima semana del 18 al 20. Esta sesión se presenta así:

'Digital' making sense for citizens: do smart public services live up to their promise? How do we make public websites accessible to all? Do we want to live in a smart city?

Digital Public Services and Smart Cities save time and money but also make the Digital Single Market a reality with new business opportunities.

ICT technologies allow for greater involvement of individuals in the design, production and delivery of services, thus empowering citizens, making smarter and greener decisions in daily life, making governments and city administrations more transparent, responsive, accountable and trustworthy, involving businesses and citizens in a continuous dialogue.

The workshop will explore what still needs to be done across borders to ensure that every citizen or consumer and company in the EU,  including people with disabilities, can benefit from digital public services. It will discuss innovation in the form of 'smart city solutions', as a platform for cross-sector solutions (bridging ICT, energy distribution, transport & mobility and construction) as well as illustrate the huge potential of Big Data in urban contexts through open-data repositories and ICT (mobile) applications.

Adaptive cities: co-design for social creativity

Notes of my talk at Forum PA/Peripheria project final conference (Rome, 29th May 2013)

Adaptive cities: co-design for social creativity from Manu Fernández

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I use the idea of adaptive cities as a response to the current economic crisis. In Spain, the real estate bubble has set a landscape of abandoned building, vacant lots waiting for better times to be built, stalled new urban developments, underused facilities and so on. All of them will be incomplete or abandoned for years. What can we do with such an amount of sites, buildings and public facilities while they are being completed or there is enough public budget to run them to their potential capacity? In this sense, adaptive urbanism is a way to come back to cities, to reclaim our cities, to foster place engagement and sense of ownership with the places we live in. And, at the same time, to boost bed-testing and use cities as platforms for new designs and new solutions by using transitional and temporary strategies in the meantime

Can we afford to have so many urban spaces not being used? Isn´t it a waste of potential energy for social creativity? What can we do with such an amount of sites, buildings and public facilities while they are being completed or there is enough public budget to run them to their potential capacity? There is a need to make use of them in the meantime and here is where transitional and temporary creative projects appear as a reponse.

My idea of adaptive cities is a way to add an strategic layer for public cities to shelter new urban practices and participatory approaches in building the city, resisting the idea that these places are residual and not worthy trying to use them in a transitional approach.

So, the basic question here is: can we afford to have so many idle urban assets, vacant spots in our cities? Here is where adaptive urbanism makes sense, as it proposes transititonal approaches and temporary uses for the meantime. There is a need to adapt some assumptions and business as usual practices in planning to allow transitional use in the meantime

In fact, this approach is not new and the interest on making the best of the public realm with reactivation project is a well known strategy. The good news now is that there is a stronger experience on temporary uses, new emerging topics such as tactical urbanism and a growing literature in the last years (Urban Catalyst and The temporary city are great references).

The interest in empty buildings and vacant spaces is not new. for example, I would like to mention now two initiatives, Temporiuso and Impossible Living, as two initiatives, among others, addressing especifically this topic.

Adaptive urbanism is a way to deal with the limits of formal planning. Planning intends to regulate uses and permits with the promise of offering a permanent solution. When a project is planned, there is an expectation that weverything will work fine (schedules and finances, but also final uses and operations). But every urban plan is out of date since it is approved, because circumstances change –and how have they changed in the last five years!- and users and citizens give new uses and behave and interact with the icty in different ways than the expected one. Formal urbanism thinks in terms of projects, material projects as an output. But now that lots of envisaged projects won´t become real for years, it is time to think in a more adaptive ways and give priority to social creativity processes and local networks as the main outcome we have to promote. This is the software of the city.

Adaptive urbanism is needed today because we are living uncentain times. All those sites, buildings, prmises waiting for new life will have to wait for better times, it seems. Well, we can wait and keep them abandoned, or we can change our minds and urban practices and introduce transitional uses. It is something that is happening in fact: in the previous economic stage, some activists, collectives and people have been working on this kind of interventions, most of the times as outsiders, and now we can discover they have suitable answers to the situation. The new economic scenario for local policies is full of constraints, but also with lots of news from citizens for physical activites, social services, cultural actions or leisure activites. And the fact tat there is an increasing demand for public expression, a new wave of social activism and a huge potential for cretivity, it is the best time to promote this kind of projects.

Just think of a vacant lot in the inner city. There is an owner, with a building permit. An urban plan and  a planned use for that site. There is even an institutional expectation for this plan to be accomplished. But now it will remain vacant for years, as it is likely that the owner won´t find it easy orprofitable to build. What can we do? What´s the traditional answer? Waiting and, at the same time, preventing any other potential use to take place in these spaces. There is something planned there, so it is not worthy making things complicate with new permits or agreements with the owner. Is that clever? Isn´t it a waste of urban capacities?

Let´s see some examples of the many that could be mentioned:

• 596 ACRES. Some people start thinking and reach to a surprising figure: there are almost six hundred acres of vacant public land in Brooklyn. Why don´t we mediate between the public owner and potential users for community activities?
• THE CINEROLEUM. There is an abandoned filling station and a group of culture agents decide that this is not a infrastructure waiting to be demolished, but a potential scenario for something to happen. And they decide to build a low budget cinema for the neighbourhood for a couple of weeks.
• CANNING TOWN CARAVANSERAI. A vacant lot in London waiting to be built. And some people decide that this is not a vacant site, but a potential agora, with a market place, premises for entrepreneurs and stages for concerts and performing arts until it is built.
• LENT SPACE. Or a private owner that understands that it will take long to build and decide to lend it to the city to make possible that something occurs there. And then it turns into a public space for cultural exhibitions.

Just some final remarks on the benefits of this approach. First, for those who fear the contradiction with planned uses, the good thing is that transitional temporary uses does not interfere or preclude planned uses or expectations, it´s just a meanwhile strategy to take advantange of paralyzed projects. Second, it is a way to test alternative uses, new practices or new ways to make people take part in the process of city building.
The kind of uses that can include, from co-working spaces to pop-up shops or start-ups incubation, it can give room for creative local economic development and, at the same time, enhance an intensified use of public space for community activites. They can shape a new understanding of urban capitals, in which not only economic capital counts, but also, knowledge, social os symbolic capitals are relevant.
And these projects shift the focus from building and expansive strategies to social networks and civic engagement for social creativity as open processes.

I just need to mention Jane Jacobs with a final remark: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” This is all about, people building the city with our own hands.

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Here you can find the video of the presentation, though the audio is actually the italian translation:

Notes - Smart cities: urban innovation and civic engagement in a networked society

Notes of my talk at Know Cities final conference (San Sebastián, 28th May 2013).

Smart cities: research and civic engagement in a networked society from Manu Fernández

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Two main trends are shaping our world: urbanization and ubiquity. We are familiar with this, I guess , I won´t go into major details about urbanization trends, but I would like to remember that when thinking about future cities, most of them will look more like Kampala than Las Vegas. For those thinking of delivering solutions in the smart cities market, this is crucial, I guess.

The second trend is, obviously, about digital technologies and the broad range of related solutions: broadband, open data, cloud computing, smartphones wireless networks, tablets, media facades, sensor networks or RFID tags... This is already happening, it is not about the future, taking the form of an everyware, quoting Adam Greenfield, between software and hardware, a complex set of devices with embedded technologies.

As I stated in the introduction, apart from practical implementation problems, we are facing a basic common agreement on the reasons why smart cities are needed (though I would remind that, for example, some conceptions on efficiency or automatization are overrated) and probably what kind of technologies will be protagonists, but the main field of disagreement is on how we will do it. Is there a clear path with so many cities, companies, thinkers and practitioners thinking about how to use digital technologies to create new public services in a smart city?

The starting point here is what we can call quantitative urbanism as an model to command and control city governance. The promise of a new science of cities and big data as the new gold rush that will fuel urban management. But we should remember cities are complex systems, with a mess of people, subsystems, services, infrastructures, interests, conflicts,...Are cities really a giant math equation? Is it possible to capture all their variables and turn urban management into a formal, quantitative, deterministic and automated system?
I don´t think so. I will try to explain why this underlying conviction that you can model, plan, and manage urban life without actually understanding urban life itself is not enough.

In a vision from above, a city is just a layout of streets, but what happens there is hidden. A street turns to be just the place to deploy sensors, a street is just a road where traffic flow occurs, a street is a physical feature and complexity can be comprised into algorithms that kill every piece of randomness. But taking the “city” dimension as a macro reference runs the risk of losing the idea of citizenship, politics, conflict, public space, etc, permanent elements of collective life that will remain beyond current technological sophistication. These ideas are hidden behind the futuristic skyscrapers, asphalt, urban form, road networks or electricity grid, the elements that are easy to find from a macro perspective and top-down analysis of the role of urban technologies.

Let´s take one of the most illustrative versions of this idea of highly planned top-down approach. The Center for Innovation Testing and Evaluation is  a project to build a city from scratch in the New Mexico desert. A whole test bed for companies to conduct experiments of their smart solutions. What´s the problem? No people will be living there.

Sensors networks will try to replicate human behaviour in a closed scenario for testing. This is another symbol of how not to understand urban innovation and the role of co-creation and collective intelligence in making cities more liveable. Let´s better concentrate on other approaches such as living labs, user experience or any other that helps us to take citizens from the beginning to conceptualise, test, improve and own technologies. Let´s better concentrate on trying to make technologies make sense in the everyday life in cities, taking first steps of research to the streets. I am sure it will be a more suitable and successful strategy to conduct urban research and technology deployment. Living labs are the fourth P of the well-known public-private-partnerships. People, citizens enjoying an open innovation framework in which universities, R&D departments and companies share their knowledge to validate users’ ideas, to grow form small to large scale local solutions, supporting user-driven innovation and considering end users and citizens in the mix of researchers.

Coming back to that pursuit for a new science of cities, the main idea I want to share is that the intelligence of cities is on the streets. It seems that cities need a remedy and I do not share such a negative attitude about cities. But every day, in every street, thousands of voluntary and involuntary acts facilitate (or hinder) life.  The real intelligence of cities lies in the almost miraculous, unstable, spontaneous order of city life. The social relationships between people generate the functional intelligence of cities. Imperfect, conflicting, disastrous at times, always open to improvement. Technology only facilitates certain processes, and the logic of collective life will defeat any attempt to implement systems that exceed the required level of sophistication.
Jane Jacobs was a great activist and researcher and her work reminds us that cities are systems of disorder, apparently. This is the obsession of some smart cities proponents: fighting this disorder with automated command and control centres that will dictate urban life. But go outside and see how behind this disorder, there is a complex order that makes cities work.

Technical innovation alone will not provide a solution, because there are structural features that retard of mitigate the impact of technology change and societal levers are as (or more) important: regulation, economics, behaviour, perceptions,... Consider this image. It is just a real-life situation. A metro station in which we can deploy a huge array of solutions for real-time tracking, public information, automatic doors and so on.  What will be crucial for that woman with a baby push-chair to take the train? It will be a mix of luck, polite behaviour of people aware of her needs, design solutions in the platform and carriage, etc. Just an anecdote, but meaningful I hope.

Open data is another great promise (The promises of open data and the same old conflicts). It´s great this movement is making loads of datasets freely available so we can use them to generate new applications and have better public information systems. But the risk here is to focus on the role of citizens as data gatherers instead of creative makers and to promote more stable ways of civic engagement. There is also a risk of falling into the trap of a deterministic vision in the use of data in political debates, which will not disappear. What kind of role can citizens play to have a say in co-creating new public services and to take action in this data ocean?

Considering these remarks, let´s see what kind of collaborative processes can be promoted to encourage civic innovation and creativity. Lots of examples could me mentioned and I chose these ones:

• New Urban Mechanics, an initiative aiming at promoting civic innovation and new public services.
• Sf.citi, as a collective effort of companies in San Francisco fostering new tech services to help tackle citizens´problems.
• Code for America as a platform for civic hacking to engage digital citizens in the process of governance and creative problem solving.
• Medialab Prado, as a laboratory for collective innovaton.
• UrbApps, a minor initiative I founded, to go beyond the classical approach to hackathons so that activists and citizens engage in coding and mobile apps development processes.

To sum up, what it is emerging is a new way to collaborate now that we have in our hands, with all the pervasive technologies we live in, a potential for a transformative role of technologies. But to do so in our hybrid cities, community engagement and strong physical connections are still relevant and the mix of digital knowledge and activism is needed more than ever.

So, let´s encourage early testing and using the city as a platform.

Think Cities #9: Los límites del urbanismo cuantitativo

Hoy participaré en la sesión de Think Cities, programa que organiza Domenico di Siena. A través de estas sesiones periódicas online y presenciales, Think Cities persigue un modelo de educación expandida para intercambiar conocimiento y crear relaciones en torno a la innovación urbana, la gestión del territorio y nuevos conceptos y prácticas alrededor de la ciudad.

Imagen de Jonathan Reyes (@ciudad_basura)

Cuando Domenico me propuso esta sesión pensé que podría ser buen momento para plantear algunos de los temas que han aparecido en el blog últimamente relacionados con la aspiración a una nueva ciencia de las ciudades, los sesgos del big data o la politización del open data. Y como poniendo títulos soy fatal, la sesión se ha quedado en Los límites del urbanismo cuantitativo, que no sé si explica mucho.

En el marco de la actual celebración en torno a la idea de las smart cities ha surgido la aspiración de una nueva ciencia de las ciudades basada en la capacidad predictiva que ofrecen el big data y otras tendencias relacionadas con la gestión de los datos de la capa digital del funcionamiento urbano. 

La sesión quiere servir para analizar este escenario y poner en cuestión los supuestos en los que se basa para tratar de buscar una visión más realista, más cercana a la cotidianeidad de la vida en la ciudad y más crítica respecto a los sesgos que puede esconder una visión determinista de las ciudades en la sociedad digital.

En cualquier caso, a partir de las 18:00 puedes seguir la sesión a través de tres vías:  1) Hangout de Google+ 2) Streaming + Chat en la plataforma Think Commons 3) Twitter con mensajes utilizando la palabra clave #thinkcities.

Smart cities: innovación y gestión urbana en la sociedad digital

Ayer tuvo lugar el seminario de cierre del proyecto Know Cities con una jornada sobre smart cities en Donostia-San Sebastián. Tuve la ocasión de participar en una sesión en la que se trataba de abordar qué papel puede jugar la idea de las ciudades inteligentes para favorecer nuevas formas de conocimiento, de impulso económico y de mejora de la gestión urbana. Por el contexto del proyecto, opté por centrar la exposición en cómo abordar la innovación urbana en su fase de experimentación y qué modelos de gestión urbana, más allá de lo institucional, se están abriendo.

Imagen tomada de Frank Taillandier en Flickr bajo licencia CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Dejo aquí el documento que utilicé como guión. Básicamente, compartí algunas ideas que han ido consolidándose en el blog como aproximación a la idea de las smart cities:

• Una revisión de las limitaciones de aspirar a un urbanismo cuantitativo como nueva ciencia de las ciudades impulsada por la gestión del big data, siguiendo las ideas del post La ciencia de las ciudades desde lo cotidiano. 
• Existe un diálogo de sordos sobre el tema, derivado de propuestas con objetivos, perspectivas e intereses muy diferentes a la hora de abordar el papel de las tecnologías digitales en la vida urbana. Cuando empecé a darle vueltas al tema pensaba que el origen de tanta confusión estaba en las diferentes temáticas o sectores que se interesan por el tema, pero con el tiempo me he ido convenciendo de que se debe más a cuestiones que dejé apuntadas en el post Escala y perspectiva en la smart city. 
• Una explicación muy básica sobre modelos divergentes de enfocar la investigación y el desarrollo de nuevas soluciones urbanas, ejemplificadas por la ciudad sin personas y los modelos de investigación abierta y ciudadana.
• Una inevitable referencia a Jane Jacobs como reclamación de una visión optimista de las ciudades que ya tenemos, como contrapunto a la idea subyacente en muchas visiones smart en las que parece que la ciudad es un desastre que necesita arreglarse como si nada funcionara cuando, en realidad, el día a día de la complejidad urbana es un pequeño milagro de orden caótico (La inteligencia está en la calle).
• De manera específica, una visión menos celebratoria sobre el rol del open data, siguiendo algunas ideas que aparecieron en The promises of open data and the same old conflicts y Hackathons y solucionismo, o por qué importa más el proceso que el resultado. 
• Un cierre con algunas ideas para promover procesos de participación y creación colectiva en el diseño de soluciones que fomenten el valor cívico de las aplicaciones móviles.

Para los que seguís el blog desde hace tiempo, nada nuevo, pero mejor ordenado o estructurado. Creo :-)

Smart cities: research and civic engagement in a networked society from Manu Fernández

elcasc - Certamen de activación socio-cultural en Villena

Durante la estancia en Valencia para el seminario Perspectivas y oportunidades de la ciudad construida, tuve la oportunidad de estar también con Fernando Navarro, que anda organizando desde El Fabricante de Esferas un proyecto muy interesante y que, además, encaja muy bien con los temas que se abordaron en el encuentro. Junto con el ayuntamiento de Villena, en colaboración con la Universidad de Alicante y con la participación de un magnífico equipo de tutores/coordinadores de diferentes actividades, el festival elcasc tendrá lugar del 29 de julio al 8 de agosto y en él se trabajará en la reactivación del tejido urbano y social del centro histórico de Villena mediante pequeñas actuaciones arquitectónicas e intervenciones artísticas, patrimoniales o socio-culturales de bajo coste, que llevarán a cabo un equipo interdisciplinar de estudiantes y jóvenes profesionales.

Para ello se celebrarán diferentes talleres (cada uno de ellos, coordinado por un tutor/es, entre los que están Zuloark, Pez [estudio], PKMN, Desayuno con Viandantes o Unusual Green) y seminarios teóricos desde diferentes campos técnicos y con el denominador común de buscar nuevos usos y utilidades alternativas a espacios del municipio en necesidad de reactivación. De esta forma, cada uno de los talleres trabajará durante los días de celebración con objetivos como la recuperación de oficios, el arte en el espacio urbano, la dinamización de espacios olvidados o la activación de espacios públicos, desde una perspectiva muy cercana a la idea del urbanismo adaptativo.

Es un formato muy sugerente de desarrollar talleres prácticos sobre diferentes temáticas en un mismo municipio que, por otro lado, tal como me enseñó Fernando, encierra en muchos de los espacios en los que se va a trabajar situaciones muy singulares y con gran potencial. Y en la trastienda, un trabajazo de organización para todo el tinglado que están montando. La buena noticia es que la inscripción ya está abierta y puede ser un posible plan para el verano si te interesan estos temas, tienes tiempo y puedes sacar algo para la matrícula.

European Metromonitor: comprendiendo el impacto de la crisis en las economías urbanas

El LSE Cities acaba de publicar European Metromonitor, una herramienta online que sistematiza y analiza el comportamiento de las 150 principales economías metropolitanas en Europa durante los años de la crisis. En este sentido, el planteamiento es similar al de otro trabajo similar, en este caso de escala global, como es el Global Metro Monitor de Brookings (aquí comentarios para las versiones de 2011 y 2012), aunque la metodología varía un poco y utiliza mejores indicadores. En ambos casos, se trabaja con indicadores muy limitados (básicamente, desempleo e ingresos, aunque en este último caso con diferencias entre un informe y otro).

En el caso que nos ocupa, creo que disponemos de mejor información; por ejemplo, European Metromonitor desagrega la información sobre desempleo y valor agregado bruto para diferentes sectores en cada ciudad, y para un periodo amplio (1996-2012) que permite partir de años antes de la crisis para observar la evolución con mejor perspectiva. También aporta información sobre las diferencias en el impacto de la crisis según diferentes tipologías de ciudades. Es una obviedad que las ciudades del sur de Europa son las que más están sufriendo este periodo por la evolución de la dinámica de sus economías nacionales. Pero, ¿y si observamos según su funcionalidad en la red europea de ciudad, su renta per capita o su población? De la misma forma, se puede acceder a información sobre resilencia como conclusión general de la capacidad que han mostrado unas ciudades u otras para soportar la recesión, utilizando para ello tres definiciones de resiliencia (capacidad de crecer después del 2008, diferencia entre los indicadores pre-recesión y post-recesión y la comparación entre el comportamiento de la economía nacional y la metropolitana).

Lo que menos me convence es la usabilidad de la visualización interactiva; en algunas secciones se hace difícil seleccionar las ciudades que quieres buscar, mientras que en otras, la solución de diseño visual no ayuda a captar conclusiones de forma rápida. Aquí, el Cities Outlook 2012 de Centre for Cities sigue convenciéndome más, tanto por utilizar más indicadores como por ofrecer una herramienta más ágil. En este campo hay mucho por avanzar, porque la información recopilada tiene mucho valor, entre otras cosas porque no es puramente estadística sino que tiene también datos tratados que hasta ahora no estaban disponibles ni centralizados en un sitio específico dedicado a las economías urbanas, y es una lástima que la navegación por los datos no permita al usuario mayores opciones de selección de datos, de comparación de ciudades o de la evolución a lo largo del tiempo.

En todos estos años se han sucedido los estudios sobre el impacto de la crisis en las ciudades, pero aún falta perspectiva para comprender hacia dónde nos lleva. En este caso, estamos ante una herramienta en beta, tal como afirman desde LSE Cities, pero el hecho de que se centre en la situación europea -con todas las dificultades, por cierto, que van a seguir existiendo para armonizar la definición de "metropolitano" en términos estadísticos- hace que el trabajo de comparación y análisis pueda aportar investigación de utilidad. Otro asunto es la limitación de los indicadores que utilizan, porque utiliza variables que apenas dicen nada sobre el impacto social de esta crisis. De hecho, son estadísticas que están disponibles en diferentes trabajos de la Unión Europea (Urban Audit, por ejemplo, aunque con datos algo desfasados, en ESPON) aunque, posiblemente, difíciles de estandarizar para hacer comparaciones de este tipo

Varios años después de que pensara en preparar algo parecido para las capitales españolas (en este estudio se cubren Bilbao, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid, Alicante-elche, Gijón, Grandad, Málaga, Sevilla, Zaragoza y Valladolid), aún está pendiente...

Member of the Advisory Board of UrbanIxD

I am happy to share I have joined the Advisory Board of UrbanIxD, a EU funded project “that will build a research network around the domain of data-rich urban environments,focusing on human activities, experiences and behaviours”.

This means an amazing chance to contribute to its objectives and to interact with a great lineup of professionals with much more experience and background than me on these topics. The most promising feature of the project, and this is why probably my contribution makes sense and why I understood the potential of this project from the very first days I got to know it, is that there is a strong focus on reflection about the role of technology in everyday life and human interaction. This research framework makes sense when there is a growing split between different approaches to smart cities and related technologies and the lack of cross-sectoral dialogue in the different knowledge fields of urban technologies. This is due to different scale and perspective approaches to understand cities or a dialogue of the deaf in which human interaction, behaviour and needs re usually cornered in the mainstream celebratory discourses that have become a standard. In this sense, the project is an opportunity to look into hybrid cities from a bottom-up pespective and community intelligence.

As members, we are expected to contribute with expertise and knowledge to help deliver a research agenda in urban interaction design by different means using a a "critical design" methodology to explore social and technological issueswhile, at the same time, we will be representing the project when appropiate in public speaking activities in which the project will be involved.

Check, for example, the information related to the UrbanIxD Summer School in Croatia that will be held next August to read about the kind of activities the project will be promoting as an intersection of new media art, urban planning, interaction design or sociology.


The Project is run by partners in four European institutions and coordinated by Michael Smyth, who kindly invited me to join the board:

• Edinburgh Napier University, UK 
• University of Aarhus, Denmark 
• Telecom Italia, Italy
• University of Split, Croatia

Urbanismo adaptativo en un mientras tanto permanente

Como comenté, la semana pasada tuvo lugar el seminario Perspectivas y oportunidades de la ciudad construida en la sede de Valencia de la UIMP.

Ha sido un encuentro bien interesante centrado en cómo sacar partido al máximo de la ciudad que ya tenemos. Ante el fin del modelo expansivo, toca volver la mirada de una vez a los espacios, edificios y equipamientos que en la ciudad consolidada están esperando una activación posible. El centro de Valencia, la ciudad entera, es una buena muestra y, de hecho, los organizadores prepararon unos mapas a la entrada de la sede a modo de exposición representando los espacios sin uso en la ciudad. Muchos, demasiados. Pero, también, muchas posibilidades de desarrollar actividades en ellos. Pero como transmitieron muchos de los proyectos que formaron parte del seminario, sólo podrán ser realidad desde nuevas prácticas urbanas y nuevas formas de crear cercanía y relación entre la ciudadanía más próxima a estos espacios.

Para variar, volví a tener la oportunidad de presentar el enfoque del urbanismo adaptativo como manera de afrontar esta realidad. Esta vez, como casi siempre, traté de ser posibilista, pensando en acercar estas prácticas y algunos ejemplos ilustrativos al pragmatismo que necesariamente se da en las áreas de gestión municipal que podrían estar interesadas en estos planteamientos. Y, al mismo tiempo, insistir en la idea de construir procesos más que construir proyectos. De hecho, me apunto que, para las siguientes, seguramente en estas presentaciones tendré que hacer más hincapié en cómo crear las condiciones y no tanto en los proyectos, espacios y usos que se pueden dar. En cualquier caso, por ahí dejo el documento que utilicé.

Urbanismo adaptativo en un mientras tanto permanente from Manu Fernández

Week picks #17

EUROPAN 12: THE ADAPTABLE CITY 

Europan has decided to make the concept of adaptable city the theme of the Europan 12 session, to be launched in 2013.

Definition: adaptability is the quality of a space that can be easily modified in harmony with the changes to which its use is subject or may be subject.

Europe’s cities are engaged in a radical transformation: they need urgently to reduce their ecological footprint to help resolve the energy crisis, combat the greenhouse effect and preserve nonrenewable resources. This transformation applies both to their morphology (form) and their metabolism (including all energy expenditure), and is highly dependent on the ways of living they provide. To achieve this, all these changes have to be thought out quickly, and that is why Europan 12 proposes to explore the question of time with a view to making the city more adaptable.

 This entails, for example, providing new ways of sharing collective space and methods of governance. This requires a chronotypical approach, blending the spatial and temporal dimensions and, for example, establishing temporary projects for spaces. This also means developing a sensitive form of urban planning, where different places can be used at different times, and rethinking the quality of the spaces from that perspective. This raises the question of the “hospitality” of urban spaces and their transparency for users of the city. It is also important to think about intensive development projects, to connect them better with the realities of today’s city. It is also about considering the multiple uses the city, and in particular the question of the sharing and recycling of buildings, to avoid excessive consumption of space and thereby to promote a sustainable city by exploiting time in its full range.

miLES – MADE IN LOWER EAST SIDE 

miLES opens underused storefronts to new possibilities, with classes, events, co-working, and short-term space rentals. We work with residents, artists, businesses and landlords in the Lower East Side to identify, program and fill underused spaces and turn them into vibrant community hubs for working, learning, connecting, and starting up new projects.

By helping to open up underused storefronts to events, classes, co-working, and “pop-up” activations, miLES hopes to create vibrant community spaces, offer a temporary home for emerging projects, and provide inclusive economic opportunities for the neighborhood.

TEMPORIUSO 

Temporiuso.net is an association to promote temporary reuse projects in abandoned spaces and also a network of local and international partnerships with associations, activists and researchers. In recent years we have started local workshops, international seminars, lectures, guided tours, events, public meetings, calls for applications with Universities, Art Academies, Research Institutes, Architecture offices, cultural associations, stylists, designers and artists.

TEMPO RIUSO aims to proclaim competitions for ideas on temporary re-use, to start-up and manage temporary use of land and buildings, to create a database where supply and demand of temporary re-use can meet, to implement a management model of temporary re-use through an Information Point.

Temporary re-use practices could become a part of the public policy agenda of Milan and its metropolitan area, where projects in temporarily allocated land are subsidiary to, and not substitutive of, permanent services to the community. Temporary land is allocated with a loan-for-use formula, or at a price-controlled rent, to non-profit organizations or low income subjects for the start-up of micro businesses and the development of social and cultural projects. Projects in temporary spaces entail the involvement of local actors and the relevant public activities.

Week picks series features every Friday some initiatives and projects I found or want to highlight on this blog. It will help me to track new findings from community groups, startups or local governments working and delivering solutions relevant to the issues of this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr while I wait to use them. Maybe this a good way.