Week picks #4

PLAY THE CITY- Office for Open Planning and Design

Play the City invents new methods for interactive city-making. We integrate city gaming, digital public polls, interactive learning, co-design and social networks with traditional architecture and urbanism. We work with cities, housing corporations and cultural organizations to generate interactive and collaborative plans with multiple stakeholders.
Play the City invents new methods for interactive city-making. We integrate city gaming, digital public polls, interactive learning, co-design and social networks with traditional architecture and urbanism. We work with cities, housing corporations and cultural organizations to generate interactive and collaborative plans with multiple stakeholders.

EMPTY SHOPS NETWORK

The Empty Shops Network is a project from Revolutionary Arts, and has encouraged prototyping, testing and reinvention of the redundant spaces in the UK’s town centres. It’s done that by providing:

• Advice; delivering workshops, seminars and masterclasses across the UK
• Advocacy; in the national media, with specialist organisations and to government; producing reports like Pop Up People; and delivering keynote speeches at conferences
• Easing administration; by giving away free resources, planning guidance and documents to make the empty shops movement ‘open source’

DUBLIN CITY COUNCIL BETA PROJECTS

This is an initative by Dublin City Council, started by the City Architects Division, with numerous members of staff contributing from many sections, divisions and departments.
This is a new approach by Dublin City Council to experiment, innovate and quickly test ideas directly ‘on the street’. Dublin City Council ‘trials’ ideas all the time, but generally as part of a real project (for example the LED lights in Smithfield). We guess the difference between a ‘trial’ and a ‘beta’ might be the headache-factor. If something has to be changed in a beta project it generally wouldn’t (read shouldn’t) cause a problem, whereas in a trial it still probably will.
Another main factor would be the public-feedback element, and the acknowledgement that it’s a ‘test’ – at the moment we say we’re doing trials, but we don’t highlight them as such, or ask for feedback (we assume we will source our own feedback internally within Dublin City Council), so aren’t they more so ‘real projects simply doing something new for the first time’?

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.