Week picks #26

THEATRUM MUNDI

Theatrum Mundi is a network of people from the performing and visual arts, the built environment disciplines, from across the academy and community and social collectives. Based in London, it activates projects, meetings, and research in cities around the world.

Theatrum Mundi asks questions about urban culture. Who makes it? Where does it take place? What are the politics of production and display? What are the connections between performance, design and politics, and how can those connections help us understand cities?

The aim of Theatrum Mundi, across its diverse activities, is to afford vulnerable provocation between people involved in confronting these and other questions about the condition, inequalities, and politics of urban culture today.

UTOPIAN CITIES

Indian cities are now more at the centre of debates on urban utopias than ever before. Whether for their entrepreneurial spirit, modernist planning, contested heritage claims,  or ‘smart’ visions, the Indian city has time and again narrated the story of India’s postcolonial coming of age. The future of the Indian city is shaped by its own history – where utopian visions of urban planning are continually reassembled by grassroots articulations of urban citizenship. Each of these grassroots imaginations of citizenship can be seen as a vision for a new alternative utopia. This international network brings together scholars, policy makers, planners and civil society members from India and the UK to explore alternative histories of the utopian city in India.
Alternative utopias of the future

Taking four contrasting cities – Varanasi, Chandigarh, Navi Mumbai and Nashik – this project explores how alternative utopias to top-down planning visions are envisioned at the grassroots. Grassroots imaginations of urban futures are often silenced as illegal, illegitimate, dissenting and anti-developmental. Yet at the same time, they can radically transform the rationalist planning visions that are often out of sync with everyday life at street level. Grassroots visions of urban futures are not necessarily against the city – they have different visions of urban utopias based on citizenship rights, justice and democracy. These visions are shaped by their historic, social and political engagement with city spaces and urban environments. We call these ‘alternative utopias’. We argue that these alternative utopias are key to the planning of future cities in India, at a time when it stands poised towards a radical shift to smart urbanism.

OPEN4CITIZENS

The technological development of the last decades made it possible to accumulate a large amount of data on every aspect of our public or private life.

Not many of us know that a large part of those data are publicly available: several public administrations are already publishing large data sets, that citizen could use to generate innovative applications to change the way we live, move, use the city and the territory.

There is a clear gap between the opportunities offered by the abundance of open data and the citizens’ capability to imagine new ways of using such data.

It involves citizens into a co-design process (hackathons), together with IT experts, public administrations, interest groups and start-up companies, in order to develop new services to improve urban quality and certain aspects of their everyday life. The aim of the project is to raise citizens’ awareness about the opportunity offered by open data and create a new culture of innovation in public services.

In each of the five pilot locations (Copenhagen, Karlstad, Rotterdam, Milano and Barcelona) the project will also create physical or virtual locations (OpenDataLab) that will become the reference point for all citizens and interest groups that want to propose innovative applications based on open data.

THE DEMOCRATIC SMART CITY

How can democratic values be built into technological designs for smart cities that require citizens to share data with each other as well as with commercial companies and governments? In this project, two philosophers and two social scientists will address this question in close collaboration with (ethical) engineers, representatives of neighborhood organizations, local councils, corporations and other interested individuals and groups.

In the future the majority of the world population will be living in cities. Many European governments and companies, therefore, stress the importance of creating smarter cities through the use of information technology. In these so called Smart Cities, tiny computers – embedded in streets, houses, cars, clothing and even on the bodies of city dwellers – gather data about traffic flows, consumer behavior, energy consumption and many other activities. A variety of applications that automatically analyze and use these data will make the city a large, efficiently organized and streamlined, comfortable living environment.

However, in view of the growing concern about the safety of information networks and the unequal distributions of power built into digital platforms, many European governments now strive to ensure that we create future smart cities based on democratic values. This challenge is the starting point for this project. In the next three years, researchers Dorien Zandbergen, Merel Noorman, Tsjalling Swierstra and Justus Uitermark will explore how democratic values can become part of designs for the Smart City.

Three things will be investigated:
1) How values, such as privacy, participation and ownership, can be built into technology.
2) How more people can actively discuss and decide about their own digital environment.
3) How the research findings of this project can be generalized, for instance, through a kind of certification tool that allow users of a digital system to see on which ethical considerations the system was based and to actively partake in the decision-making processes about the design of the system

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Week picks series features different initiatives and projects I found or want to highlight on this blog. It will help me track new findings from community groups, startups or local governments working and delivering solutions relevant to the issues covered on this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr.

Week picks #25

CITIES OF DATA. EXPLORING THE NEW URBAN SCIENCE

Today, a new wave of rapid global urbanization in the Global South, combined with the need to curb carbon emissions in the cities of the Global North, is driving renewed interest in the city as an object of scientific inquiry and engineering design. New institutions to pursue this agenda are appearing on an almost daily basis. And much like a century ago, they are leveraging and nurturing collaborations amongst new talent from many different fields of study and practice – who see in cities questions of great complexity.

The big question this project seeks to address then is – what happens next for urban studies, and what does it mean for the way we build, manage and live in cities? Are we at a new inflection point, like the birth of planning itself in the early 20th century? What might come out the other side of this historic process – a completely new field, a dramatically changed one, or a continuation of the status quo?

The stage is set for a big shakeup in what we study about cities how we do it. During the 20th century, leaps in urban science were often driven by basic curiosity and a technocratic mindset. The flow of knowledge was generally in one direction, from researcher to public official. But this upheaval comes within a new urban and technological context, which may create a dramatically new kind of science. Cities are growing bigger, faster and with fewer financial resources than ever before, and eager to define the problems for scientists to tackle. Citizens raised in an era of mass connectedness and transparency expect to participate in efforts to study urban problems and put the resulting solutions into action. Open data platforms provide powerful tools for new kinds of research collaborations.

How, then, is the new urban science engaging local governments and citizens? What is the role of open data in facilitating these collaborations? And how might these research practices produce better science, and improve the transfer of new discoveries into the public and private sector?

URBAN BIG DATA CENTRE

The Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) was established by the UK Economic and Social Research Council to address social, economic and environmental challenges facing cities.

The UBDC brings together interdisciplinary expertise of urban social scientists and data scientists from the University of Glasgow and six partner universities of Edinburgh, Bristol, Cambridge, Reading, Sheffield and Illinois-Chicago to seek solutions in addressing such challenges.

We support strategies for urban planning and policy-making, business innovations, behavioural interventions for sustainable and engaged urban living, and advocacy and citizen participation relating to a wide spectrum of urban sectors such as economic development, transport, housing, education, environment and other areas.

Our academic researchers are undertaking innovative research projects, covering methodology such as big data management and urban indicators for policymaking, as well as a range of urban topics such as housing, transportation, migration and more.

The work of the UBDC also focuses on methods and technologies to manage, link and analyse massive amounts of multi-sectoral urban big data. This includes a data portal for open and safeguarded data, allowing users from diverse backgrounds access to our data for their own research and analyses.

Additionally, the UBDC provides a range of research support services, training and capacity-building to a wide range of users, including public events such as workshops, seminars and training sessions.

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Week picks series features different initiatives and projects I found or want to highlight on this blog. It will help me track new findings from community groups, startups or local governments working and delivering solutions relevant to the issues covered on this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr.

Week picks #24

URBAN DEMOCRACY LAB

Founded in January of 2014, the Urban Democracy Lab is an initiative of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University whose objective is to provide a space for scholars and practitioners to collaborate and exchange ideas for cultivating just, sustainable, and creative urban futures.  As a “lab,” we invite experimentation, provisional conclusions, and fresh approaches to entrenched urban problems. To ensure broad thinking, we welcome partnerships that bridge traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

Our main areas of interest are:

• Urban Ecology. The ecology of cities relies as much on human interactions with nature as it does on people’s relationships to one another. We are interested in how the environment and land use are governed, as well as how people can work together to decide upon, design, and influence the spaces in which they live.
• Economic Equity. Economic equity and inequity exist in every detail of urban life. More often than not, cash and credit, rather than public will, determine who among us has access to resources such as good healthcare, well-maintained and affordable housing, strong schools, green spaces, and even quality groceries—and who of us does not. We examine the ways in which economic power is being redistributed in urban communities and the reverberations of these experiments on democratic participation.
• Citizenship. The term “citizenship” conjures everything from documentation to civics education to planting a community garden. We think of citizenship in these ways, but also as a category that is constantly being redefined; at times, it is capacious and accessible, and, at other times, brutally restrictive. As national boundaries blur and global interdependencies strengthen, we ask: what does citizenship mean for the 21st century?
• Arts and the City. One way to measure the vibrancy of a city is to look at what regard it has for the arts. Street art, public sculpture, pop-up galleries, music and dance performances, and museum exhibitions all underline the importance of creative pursuits that bring people together and communicate the variety of individual, urban experiences. We are interested in art that engages the public and invites people to interrogate their surroundings, and celebrate art that opens up greater possibilities for civic dialogue and social justice.

PARTICIPEDIA

Participedia harnesses the power of collaboration to respond to a recent global phenomenon: the rapid development of experiments in new forms of participatory politics and governance around the world.

We live in a world in which citizens of most countries are asking for greater involvement in collective decisions. Many governments, non-governmental organizations, and even some corporations are responding by experimenting with ways to increase public participation.

Hundreds of thousands of participatory processes occur each year in almost every country in the world. They are occurring in a wide variety of political and policy problems. And they often supplement and sometimes compete with more traditional forms of politics, such as representative democracy.

Participedia responds to these developments by providing a low-cost, easy way for hundreds of researchers and practitioners from across the globe to catalogue and compare the performance of participatory political processes.

Practitioners, activists, government officials, and journalists will benefit from Participedia’s searchable database of cases, methods, and organizations, including knowledge about how well processes have worked for similar problems, under similar conditions.

Social scientists, policy analysts, democratic theorists, and other scholars will benefit from access to a dynamic, diverse, and growing source of comparable qualitative and quantitative data. We encourage you to contribute information on case studies, methods and organizations. The more you participate, the more you will appreciate what this site has to offer.

D-CENT

D-CENT is a Europe-wide project creating privacy-aware tools and applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment. Together with the citizens and developers, we are creating a decentralised social networking platform for large-scale collaboration and decision-making.The D-CENT platform is built together with citizens. Pilots running in Finland, Iceland and Spain gather use cases and knowledge from people who have already used online tools for direct democracy on an ad hoc basis. Direct Democracy/Political Empowerment means more direct engagement in democratic decision making.

D-CENT builds on Europe’s largest experiments in direct democracy, showing how millions of citizens can become engaged in deliberation, and decision-making:

• Spain: 15M citizen movement, one of Europe’s most dynamic social movements
• Iceland: Citizen Foundation, Better Reykjavik, and Better Iceland participation democracy websites
• Finland: Open ministry Crowdsourced lawmaking site linked to Parliament

In the second phase of the project, these new approaches to empowerment are connected to economic platforms. Goal is to extend, scale and link up community digital social currencies, and create building blocks for an economy that links exchange to trust, deliberation and collective awareness.

Open, scalable, modular technology
D-CENT will be an open, modular and decentralized platform to build privacy-aware applications. The code-base will be described by open specifications and released under an open source license. Developers will be able to easily write API-based apps plus add new modules. The modular platform enables to share in real-time open data, democratic decision making tools, and digital social currency for the social good. The D-CENT platforms will go beyond data aggregation to enable deliberation and collective judgment, informed by feedback.

CIVIC STACK

¿Qué es Civic Stack?
Civic Stack es el lugar donde juntamos y compartimos herramientas cívicas de distintos países y organizaciones para que puedas adaptarlas y utilizarlas en el lugar donde vivís.

¿Cuál es nuestro objetivo?
Nuestro objetivo es dar un fácil acceso a las herramientas cívicas digitales para que organizaciones activistas puedan incentivar a la participación ciudadana o fortalecer sus procesos organizativos y de toma de decisiones.
Al mismo tiempo, buscamos que las organizaciones que desarrollan tecnología se basen en el trabajo de otros, colaboren con el trabajo de otros, en vez de "reinventar la rueda".
¿Qué información aparece en Civic Stack?
En Civic Stack vas a encontrar información útil sobre cada herramienta (app o web): su objetivo, su alcance, su origen, su repositorio de GitHub. Es crowdsourced data, y las organizaciones pueden crear sus propios perfiles y cargar sus propias herramientas.

En Civic Stack, todas las herramientas que encuentres, y que vas a encontrar siempre, son open source!

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Week picks series features different initiatives and projects I found or want to highlight on this blog. It will help me track new findings from community groups, startups or local governments working and delivering solutions relevant to the issues covered on this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr.

Week picks #23

DATA & SOCIETY RESEARCH INSTITUTE

The Data & Society Research Institute is a new, New York City-based think/do tank launching in 2014 dedicated to addressing social, technical, ethical, legal, and policy issues that are emerging because of data-centric technological development. Data & Society will provide a space for researchers, entrepreneurs, activists, policy creators, journalists, geeks, and public intellectuals to gather, debate, and engage one another on the key issues introduced by the increasing availability of data in society.
Data & Society will bring together divergent constituencies, host events, do directed research, create policy frameworks, and build demonstration projects to grapple with the challenges and opportunities presented by an ever-increasing amount of available information. The Institute will imagine, take on, and develop projects that will help society’s understanding of and ability to adapt to a data-soaked world. The output of this Institute will be directed at broad audiences.

LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

The Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City) is Mexico City’s new experimental office for civic innovation and urban creativity, the first city government department of its kind in Latin America. The Lab is a space for rethinking, reimagining, and reinventing the way citizens and government can work together towards a more open, more livable and more imaginative city.
How do we reconnect cities and citizens through government itself?
This is the question that drives our work at the Lab. We approach it not only as a matter of delivering better services or offering new channels for engagement, but truly reimagining the role of government and how it can contribute to building better cities.
What if government went beyond administration, promoting innovation, and even possibly channeling imagination? What if government was not just a regulator, but a true catalyzer for change?
The Lab is conformed by a young, multidisciplinary team, mostly without prior government experience. We’re an unusual bunch: architects, technologists, editors, art historians, political scientists, journalists, urban planners, filmmakers, sociologists, designers, urban psychologists… The one thing we all share is our impatient optimism, a passion for the city, and the belief that positive change can be born within government.
Another key factor is collaboration. The Lab is constantly seeking new proposals and provocations around the problems and opportunities of the city through collaborative efforts, both within government and through civil society.

URBAN CENTER FOR COMPUTATION AND DATA

Today's leading cities are also collecting and publishing  an unprecedented volume and diversity of city data and deploying advanced technologies to optimize many city services and functions.  These new data sources are catalyzing new applications and services, changing the way that citizens can interact with the built environment, city government, and one another.  Moreover, there is opportunity to apply computational tools and methods to enable cities to move from reactive to proactive policies and investments, to use computational models to explore potential outcomes of new designs, plans, and expansions.
To pursue these opportunities, the Urban Center for Computation and Data (UrbanCCD) was created in 2012 within the Computation Institute, a joint initiative of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.  UrbanCCD combines the complementary strengths of Argonne in physical sciences and engineering with UChicago’s expertise in social sciences, economics, and policy.  The center also unites researchers multiple academic institutions, city agencies, architectural firms, and private enterprise.
UrbanCCD’s mission is to catalyze and pursue an interdisciplinary research agenda in urban sciences aimed at increasing our understanding of cities and our ability to anticipate the effects of rapid global urbanization on natural, built, and socioeconomic systems.
UrbanCCD is pursuing this mission by:
• applying expertise and resources in computational modeling to transform the way cities are designed and expanded through the integration of urban design tools with computational simulation,
• creating data analytics techniques and capabilities that allow for proactive city operation and planning, relying upon evidence-based analytics to move beyond policy based primarily on heuristics and intuition, and
• providing tools and methods to integrate data from a variety of sources, including databases, scientific simulations, and mobile and fixed sensors, and exploring new paradigms harnessing embedded technologies to enrich the urban experience.

Week picks series features different initiatives and projects I found or want to highlight on this blog. It will help me track new findings from community groups, startups or local governments working and delivering solutions relevant to the issues covered on this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr.

Week picks #22

THE WISE CITY

The Wise City is a socially responsible civic engagement, service design, and product strategy practice. It's a civic production company bringing the right partners and methods together to invent the best future now. It's a network of change agents deeply focused on advancing peer to peer bottom-up movements renewing a social contract based on wise self-governance. It is transcultural, transdisciplinary, ever transforming.
Let's focus on individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working neighborhoods over bureaucratic regulations, resident collaboration over internal planning, responding to change over following a plan. Let's move away from outdated 20th century ideas of a technocratic “smart” city. A better world is not only possible it is already here because wiser ways are increasingly preferred.

i-DAT

i-DAT is an Open Research Lab for playful experimentation with creative technology.
We co-create and share technological prototypes and practices, that push and challenge the boundaries of digital arts and creative media practice. Our main focus is on making ‘data’ tangible, playable and readily available as a material, to generate new meaning and inform participation, audience engagement and innovation in the arts.
i-DAT believes passionately, that it must embrace the opportunities created by digital technologies to be open and collaborative, in order to sustainably co-create social, economic and cultural benefit for society in general and predominantly, for current and future generations of young people.
Hosted by Plymouth University, it has been delivering world class cultural activities since 1998. In March 2012 i-DAT became an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.
i-DAT manages the development of the Immersive Vision Theatre, delivering shows, productions and research into immersive fulldome environments. Further information can be found here: http://i-dat.org/ivt/
Through a rich interaction with teaching [BA/BSc/MRes Digital Art & Technology in the School of Art & Media], research [MADr / Cognition Institute] and enterprise, i-DAT provides access to new technologies, knowledge and ideas. Collaborations with Peninsula Arts and Science and Technology programmes place i-DAT at the heart of Plymouth University’s cultural activities.

CIVIC SYSTEMS LAB

Civic Systems Lab has built a body of knowledge on how we understand, seed, and develop citizen-led change and the civic economy. We have done this together with a wide range of partners from across the public private and third sector. Each of our partners and projects has helped us to better understand what’s possible and what’s at stake.
We have researched local innovation extensively through Hand Made, the Community Lover’s Guides and the Compendium for the Civic Economy.
We have a set of prototypes in progress that are testing the conditions, tactics, tools and wider platforms needed for supporting civic change, including The Open Works in Lambeth, Open Hub in Dudley, Hub Westminster in Westminster, The Common Room in Norwich, The Open Institute in London, Library Lab in Brent and Trading Spaces in Sidcup. Each of these prototypes re-designs infrastructures and methods to stimulate and support the emergence of new local initiative. And each of them creates a better understanding of the system in which they are currently embedded and how it needs to change, from project initiation to structural finance, from governance to collective learning.
From March 2014 will be incubating civic initiatives across Birmingham and the Black Country with a £750,000 investment programme: with the Civic Systems Launchpad, part of the Hub Launchpad programme, we are increasing the scale to city level. We aim to scale up our impact by applying and validating what we have been learning into whole-systems re-design through collaborating with a further five major cities over the next 2 years.

GLOBAL URBAN COMMONS

In form and content, the Global Urban Commons is a dynamic global directory for urban researchers and practitioners.
Employing a searchable database, the Internet, e-mail, and video-conferencing, it enhances sharing data, collaboration, and learning in real time. It aims to strengthen existing partnerships, stimulate new relationships, and expose scholars and practitioners to new lines of thought that they would not otherwise encounter.

Week picks series features different initiatives and projects I found or want to highlight on this blog. It will help me track new findings from community groups, startups or local governments working and delivering solutions relevant to the issues covered on this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr.

Week picks #21

BIG BANG DATA (May 8-October 26 2014)

Big Bang Data explores the phenomenon of the information explosion we are currently experiencing. The last five years have seen the emergence of a generalized awareness among academic and scientific sectors, government agencies, businesses and culture that generating, processing and above all interpreting data is radically transforming our society.
We all generate data, with our mobile phones, sensors, social networks, digital photographs and videos, purchase transactions and GPS signals. What is new is that it is increasingly easy to store and process these vast quantities of data that detect patterns (of incidents, behaviour, consumption, voting, investment, etc.). This fact is very quickly and completely changing the way decisions are made at all levels.
Is data the new oil, a potentially boundless source of wealth? Is it the ammunition for arms of mass surveillance? Or should it be primarily an opportunity, an instrument for knowledge, prevention, efficiency and transparency, a tool to help construct a more transparent, participatory democracy?
The CCCB has created a space for exhibition projects that bring an integrative approach to the culture of the 21st century and the far-reaching transformations of the digital age.
For the five months of Big Bang Data, the expository space will also be a platform for meeting and debating this highly topical theme, with workshops, hackathons, education programmes and meetups for local and international communities.

MEDIA ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE 2014 (November 19-22 2014)

Architects, designers and artists meet with academia and industry, when the world’s premier media architecture event takes place on 19-22 November in Aarhus, Denmark, with a pre-event in Copenhagen. Across professions and nationalities, participants will create and discuss the media architecture of the future. And they will investigate how media architecture shapes people’s lives in the cities of the world.
The biennale brings together people and organisations that work with media and the built environment: With media facades, with urban screens and with buildings that communicate – be it with colourful LEDs, flashing light bulbs, or with heat-sensitive concrete that ’freezes’ the shadows of passers-by.

|city|data|future| INTERACTIONS IN HYBRID URBAN SPACE: THE URBANIXD EXHIBITION (September 24 2014)

The UrbanIxD project takes the view that cities in the future will contain a complex mesh of interconnected, heterogeneous technological systems. Technology will continue to evolve, and the data-reading and writing capabilities of cities will only increase, but mess and complexity will still be the background context.
The focus of the emergent field of Urban Interaction Design is public space and the relationships between people – with and through technology2. The currency of these interactions is data. Making sense of this data, and making it meaningful, transparent, useful and enjoyable is a challenge for interaction design.
The | City | Data | Future | exhibition speculates about the possible futures that city inhabitants might experience.

DIGITAL INTELLIGENCE 2014 (September 17-19 2014)

The main objective of #di2014 is to bring together researchers, practitioners and students from a large variety of fields and to provide them with the opportunity to share their visions and research achievements as well establish worldwide cooperative research and developpement.
Areas of research include but are not limited to: Data, Social Web, Digital Humanities, Digital Identity, The commons, Digital Art, Smart Cities, Media and Digital Cultures, Human-Computer Interface, Digital Literature, Digital Literacy, Computational Thinking, Secutity, Safety and Privacy, e-Learning, Business intelligence.
The mindset of #di2014 is unique in bringing these disciplines together in creative and critical dialogs. We broadly invite contributions that describe original research, analysis, practices, and works-in-progress in all areas of Digital Cultures.

Week picks series features different initiatives and projects I found or want to highlight on this blog. It will help me track new findings from community groups, startups or local governments working and delivering solutions relevant to the issues covered on this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr.

Week picks #20

THINGFUL

Thingful is a discoverability engine for The Public Internet of Things, providing a geographical index of where things are, who owns them, and how and why they are used.
Today, millions of people and organisations around the world already have and use connected 'things', ranging from energy monitors, weather stations and pollution sensors to animal trackers, geiger counters and shipping containers. Many choose to, or would like to, make their data available to third parties – either directly as a public resource or channeled through apps and analytical tools.
Thingful organises 'things' around locations and categories and structures ownership around Twitter profiles (which can be either people or organisations), enabling citizens to discuss why and how they are using their devices and data. Because, the 'who', 'why' and 'where' are ultimately far more important in The Public Internet of Things than the 'what'.
Explicitly built for people, communities, companies and cities that want to make the data from these 'things' available and useful to others, Thingful aggregates and indexes public information from some of the major IoT platforms and data infrastructures around the world, providing direct links to datasets and profile pages for the public things that it knows about.

CITIZEN SENSE

The Citizen Sense project is funded through a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, and runs from 2013-2017. The project investigates, through three project areas, the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing and citizen engagement. Wireless sensors, which are an increasing part of digital communication infrastructures, are commonly deployed for environmental monitoring within scientific study. Practices of monitoring and sensing environments have migrated to a number of everyday participatory applications, where users of smart phones and networked devices are able to engage with similar modes of environmental observation and data collection. Such “citizen sensing” projects intend to democratize the collection and use of environmental sensor data in order to facilitate expanded citizen engagement in environmental issues. But how effective are these practices of citizen sensing in not just providing “crowd-sourced” data sets, but also in giving rise to new modes of environmental awareness and practice?
Through intensive fieldwork, study and use of sensing applications, the project areas set out to contextualize, question and expand upon the understandings and possibilities of democratized environmental action through citizen sensing practices. The first project area, “Wild Sensing,” focuses on the use of sensors to map and track flora and fauna activity and habitats. The second project area, “Pollution Sensing,” concentrates on the increasing use of sensors to detect environmental disturbance, including air and water pollution. The third project area investigates “Urban Sensing,” and focuses on urban sustainability or “smart city” projects that implement sensor technologies to realize more efficient or environmentally sound urban processes.

CIVIC SYSTEMS LAB

A collective vision of what is possible is already being pieced together. Over the last 5 years we have seen an explosion of new citizen-led and hybrid cross-sector experiments seeking to address our disenfranchised society.
In food systems people are creating new ways to grow, sell, make, eat food - outside of existing consumer-orientated economic systems.  We are seeing the system innovations in energy creation, distribution and surplus use, in monetary mechanisms through credit unions and local currencies, in the physical making of houses, furniture, clothing.
These initiatives are working not to build new public services, remediation strategies or consumer markets but reframe our everyday local experience toward a participatory and civic economy. Each new initiative adds to a body of imaginative ideas and critical lessons of how we, as individuals and groups and organisations, can together create stronger local economies through an open and participatory society.
We now need to go further…. with a whole systems approach
Our challenge is now to create the conditions and mechanisms for such change to flourish – a whole systems approach which accelerates local initiatives to solve unique problems, with unique opportunities, using unique local resources. This practical and participatory localism cannot be, and must not be, a rare act performed by a few - but a common happening - a different way of living our day-to-day lives in which the many become co-producers of this new local.

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

Week picks #19

LIVING INNOVATION ZONES

The Living Innovation Zone Program (LIZ) makes it possible to use public space in new and exciting ways. LIZ makes it easier for people and organizations to utilize City-owned property
for creative projects and innovative technologies.

San Francisco is the innovation capital of the world. The city is home to some of the most dynamic people, institutions and corporations on the planet. Its culture celebrates human capital, new modes of thinking, creative expression and a DIY spirit. Yet, walking around the city’s public spaces, there are few monuments or physical expressions of the economic and technological movements that define San Francisco today.

The Living Innovation Zone Program (LIZ) seeks to create a flexible framework that harnesses the city’s creativity by using City-owned assets, such as public spaces, and partnerships with leading organizations as catalysts for exploration, innovation and play.

CONNECTING CITIES: PARTICIPATORY CITY 2014 - CALL FOR PROJECTS

Interactive technologies enable citizens to participate directly in artistic urban media projects. Thus they can play an active role in their urban environment instead of being passive consumers.

In 2014, with the topic of Participatory City, the Connecting Cities Network will in particular discuss the question of how urban media facades as a temporary field of interaction can become a catalyst for shared encounters and a platform for urban activism. Can art projects trigger an engagement of the citizens within their local communities? Can they connect the local public virtually with remote places? Can they help us exchange our expectations and visions with our (European) neighbours? Participatory City 2014 is all about experimenting in the public space with participatory processes that aim at exploring these and other questions.

Participatory City 2014 will take place in Berlin, Brussels, Helsinki, Linz, Liverpool, Madrid, Montreal, Riga and Sao Paulo. The Connecting Cities infrastructure to be considered by the artists for this Call for Proposals corresponds to the urban media facades of these cities. Nevertheless we also welcome proposals directed to other partner cities of the Connecting Cities Network. We will forward these proposals to the partner cities who might then decide to join our 2014 Connecting Cities Events.

Challenging questions: How can we open the screens as digital stages for public interventions? What is the impact of participatory projects realised in the European space on audience and community development of the European neighbourhoods?

The curators of the Connecting Cities Network will select at least 7 artist projects for the Connecting Cities Events of the Participatory City 2014. These projects will be presented on the urban media facades of the CCN and open live windows to other cities. The main challenge of Participatory City will be to identify contents with relevance on an international level and a site-specific local level by including the public audience in an artistic scenario.

THE HYBRID CITY ONLINE RESOURCE

The Hybrid City online resource aims to present artistic practices and innovative research projects which critically address the urban media while they also introduce new modes of their utilization and development. The online resource presents a wide spectrum of initiatives including visualisations, mappings, downloadable applications, urban mobile and online tools, game platforms, workshops documentations as well as models and prototypes which all seem to take into consideration not only the technological possibilities offered, but also the needs and interests of the city inhabitants.

Embracing collaboration, using DIY or DIWO practices and empowering local voices, some of the projects presented propose new forms of civic engagement and emphasize the need to remember a city’s cultural traits and societal features. Other works specifically examine the role of urban media in times or insurrection and recession and a great number of them raise issues of surveillance and control. Centralized mechanisms are often exposed, while the distributed logic is counter-proposed and spread as urban action. As citizen science becomes grassroots, measurements get performative and collective decision making becomes playful, the hybrid city online resource captures a city which is perceived not only through aggregated data, but also through collaborative efforts, hacked systems and affective dynamics.

Week picks series features some Fridays different 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 covered on this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr while I wait to use them. Maybe this a good way.

Week picks #18

MIT Cities

The City Science Initiative at the MIT Media Lab is a unique network of research groups experienced in the design of technology and infrastructure, the analysis of big data, and the development of rigorous scientific theories. The City Science Initiative at the MIT Media Lab provides an interdisciplinary nexus where these research networks join to improve the design, livability and understanding of high performance urban environments.
Rather than separate systems by function - water, food, waste, transport, education, energy - we must consider them holistically. Instead of focusing only on access and distribution systems, our cities need dynamic, networked, self-regulating systems that take into account complex interactions. In short, to ensure a sustainable future society, we must deploy evolving technologies to create a nervous system for cities that maintains the stability of their government, energy, mobility, work, and public health networks.
Building on current work at the MIT Media Lab, City Science researchers will initially focus on the following project themes. Additional project themes will be added in response to the priorities of coporate members, MIT researchers, and the City Science advisory board. These six initial themes represent a cross section of the interdisciplinary research that will be undertaken to address the major challenges associated with global urbanization.
1. Urban analytics and modeling
2. Incentives and governance
3. Mobility networks
4. Places of living and work
5. Electronic and social networks
6. Energy networks


NEW LOCAL GOVERNMENT NETWORK

What is NLGN? Nine people producing reports and events from an office in London? Fifty organisations trying to improve public services? A unique forum for bringing together public and private sectors?
We’re all those things, but none of them really captures our fundamental mission, which is to bring together the best in our sector to create a brighter future for local government.
At NLGN our job is to help councils, private businesses, third sector organisations and anyone who has an interest in making local public services better and more sustainable to step back from the daily grind and look to the horizon.
The thing that makes us special is our network. We build real, meaningful relationships with our partners because that’s the only way we can deliver work that’s both imaginative and grounded.
Our research always aims to challenge without drifting off into impractical blue skies thinking. Much of our work is moving beyond the classic research and report template towards innovative new participative methodologies that bring the collective brainpower of our membership to bear.
Our deep engagement with the sector is also the source of our authority to challenge national policy. We‘re frequently called on to advise government on everything from city deals to neighbourhood community budgets.

URBAN CONTEXT

URBANCONTEXT is an independent institute for urban and regional research in Berlin.
The institute is specialized in quantitative research into questions with practical and political relevance. The range of research covers economic evaluation of urban development and regional planning as well as quantifying subjectively perceived determinants of urban life quality. URBANCONTEXT aims to improve transfer of knowledge from academic research into political and planning practice. Current data and results are visually edited and presented transparently in order to be accessible to the public. Innovative methods of applied science are intended to take effect in politics and economics.
URBANCONTEXT is a project partner with members who are well established, connected and active in international economics. We are directly involved in processes of knowledge generation and our research represents a huge degree of critical reflection at the highest scientific level. You benefit from our direct access to the cutting-edge of research in urban economics.




Week picks series features some Fridays different 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 covered on this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr while I wait to use them. Maybe this a good way.

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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.

Week picks #16

reSITE FESTIVAL 

The only prerequisite for being an urban designer is caring deeply about cities. We want to catalyze more urban designers. In 2012, reSITE organized the first festival in the Czech Republic to focus on the notion of design, culture, politics, finance, participation and sustainability in public space. We encouraged university students, families and business leaders to reTHINK their city at free public events aimed at making city design accessible to everyone. The festival took place in the center of the city in the piazzetta of the National Theatre and on the Vltava Riverfront in Prague.
 In 2013, reSITE will work in concert with dozens of partners to continue to catalyze while also discovering models of design process that can inspire social action and facilitate a more inclusive bottom-up / top-down urban process. We want to make urban design cool.

ADAPTIVE METROPOLIS – USER GENERATED URBANISM 

A cohort of citizens, designers, artists, activists, academics, entrepreneurs, government officials, and policymakers across the world are taking action to reinvent public space and reaffirm the 'right to the city'. They employ a series of disparate tactics, combining the limited available resources with a large dose of creativity. They favor small-scale, short-term interventions that involve experimentation and iteration, implementing them through participatory processes and community engagement while opensourcing tools, methodology, and results. Together, they are building the foundations for a usergenerated urbanism. The Adaptive Metropolis symposium will convene a global community of thinkers and doers to discuss the future of this model of city-making.

POSSIBLE CITY 

The Possible City seeks to create a local economy built around rebuilding the city. Our initial focus will be on the cities forgotten spaces — Those places which have for one reason or another vexed the established political and economic structures, those places for which existing planning processes and techniques have failed. We believe that the Possible City will emerge from these forgotten spaces, and that the plan for the future city will emerge from the Possible City in a constant state of making and remaking. And because of our history, because we believe in the necessity of connecting the virtual with physical specificity, and because of its history and inherent qualities, the Possible City will focus its initial efforts in Philadelphia and Brooklyn.

What Do We Plan to Do About It? The Possible City seeks to create community and economy structured around re-purposing vacant and underutilized land for innovative new uses. First, we plan to uncover people and organizations who are already working in this space and provide tools and community to strengthen and enhance their projects. Second, we want to inspire and empower additional entrepreneurs, designers, activists, artists, and everyday citizens to capitalize on the opportunities presented through vacancy. Third, we want to connect these individuals and groups together to amplify their impact on a city-wide scale. Fourth, we want to feed this information back into governments and institutions so that they can develop policies and programs to support these emergent structures. We believe that the Possible City will emerge from the city's forgotten spaces, and that the plan for the future city will emerge from the Possible City in a constant state of making and remaking.


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.

Week picks #15

URBAN IXD

UrbanIxD is a Coordination Action project, running from 2013-2014, for the European Commission under the Future and Emerging Technologies programme. This Coordination Action will define a coherent multidisciplinary research community working in the domain of technologically augmented, data-rich urban environments, with particular focus on the human activities, experiences and behaviours that occur within them (Interaction Design).

A transformation is taking place in how our cities work. Cites are being laced with sensors and mobile technologies that are generating a myriad of urban informatics experiences. A digital landscape overlays our physical world and is expanding to offer ever-richer experiences. In the cities of the future, computing isn’t just with us; it surrounds us, and it uses the context of our environment to empower us in more natural, yet powerful ways.

By employing a Critical Design methodology the UrbanIxD project will provide an opportunity to re-think what intelligent connected communities of the future might actually look like. It will question the premise of the smart city and will develop a community of researchers with a shared commitment to the foregrounding of the human experience in the field of Urban Interaction Design.

TUMML

Tumml is an urban impact accelerator supporting early stage companies developing innovative consumer products and services that improve urban living. Tumml connects entrepreneurs with funding, mentors, and a community of people dedicated to urban impact. Join us and be part of the urban impact revolution!

The first Tumml cohort will run from June 2013 through September 2013. Applications for the Summer 2013 cohort will open in March 2013.


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.

Week picks #14

THRESHOLD ARCHITECTURE HUB

Threshold is a pop up architecture and built environment centre demonstrating how architects and associated creative professionals can adapt, reuse, transform and re-invent the spaces around us, presenting an exhibition and programme of public events on the theme of inhabiting un[der]-used space(s).
It will be curated to include work and activity inspired by the theme from the architectural and creative communities of Brighton and Hove and Sussex and will be open to the public daily within the Love Architecture festival. The programme will include site-specific installations, exhibitions, workshops, film, talks and events.
Threshold will be based the car park of myhotel, Brighton, and is lead by RIBA Sussex Branch with a:b:i:r architects Chalk Architecture, architectural photographer Jim Stephenson and arts consultant and curator Cara Courage.

THE SPONTANEOUS CITY

The Spontaneous City International (SPcitI) works on the central question of
how to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their city
SPcitI attempts to achieve from local understanding how small scale, user-defined developments can be realized without clashing with the actual planning systems  (e.g. fixed master plans, ready-made city extensions, gated communities, overly restrictive land use regulations, smart cities). Thus it introduces a new practice and looks for local commitment in collective development strategies.  It is a reaction to today’s conditions: the duality and discrepancies between local-specific and worldwide trends, the new geopolitical and economic evolutions have clearly shown that the current practices are not wholly reliable in the long term.

OFFICE OF URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS RESEARCH (OUTR)

OUTR is a research laboratory in the School of Architecture + Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. We explore design as an agent of understanding and responding to challenges of a rapidly changing complex world through live projects in collaboration with a range of industry and government stakeholders.



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.

Week picks #13

TEMPORARY MOBILE EVERLASTING

Mobile and temporary public projects have become part of the repertoire of spatial production in our cities. Over the last years London (as well as numerous other cities) has seen a flurry of temporary and mobile architectural projects which turned vacant land into spectacles before disappearing again leaving behind memories of short lived alternatives.

A culture of temporary projects has developed which allows architects to work in more direct and spontaneous ways with places and communities while at the same time challenging assumptions about architectural practice and the production of public spaces.

Initially driven by architects or artists and often funded by cultural institutions temporary use has moved into the sphere of city planning. The in between use of vacant land has been adopted by developers and city councils as part of a longer term strategy to keep vacant areas active while using a minimum of resources, often relying heavily on local volunteer networks and the initiative of individuals. What started as a bottom up tactics has become top down strategic thinking.

The website aims to take a critical look at the practice of temporary use in London and investigate in detail what the legacy of those projects can be, what values are created and who are the ones benefiting from the collective efforts.

PAVEMENT TO PARKS SAN FRANCISCO

San Francisco's streets and public rights-of-way make up 25% of the city's land area, more space than all the park area combined. Many of our streets are excessively wide and contain large zones of underutilized space, especially at intersections. San Francisco's "Pavement to Parks" program seeks to temporarily reclaim these unused swathes of land and quickly and inexpensively turn them into new public spaces.

San Francisco's Pavement to Parks projects are inspired by the recent success of similar projects in New York City - where plazas and seating areas have been created in excess roadway simply by painting or treating the asphalt, placing protective barriers along the periphery, and installing moveable tables and chairs.

Each Pavement to Parks project is intended to be a public laboratory for the City to work with local communities to temporarily test new ideas in the public realm. Materials and design interventions are meant to be temporary and easily removable should design changes be desired during the trial-run. After testing their performance, some spaces are reclaimed permanently as public open spaces. Seating, landscaping and paving treatment are common features of all projects.

LOCAL PROJECTS

Local Projects is a media design firm for museums and public spaces. While innovation drives much of today’s design, we’re interested in creating projects that endure.

We create media that is integrated into architecture and online spaces, and that connects people with the world and each other. Many of our projects are about co-creation: gathering visitor stories, or collecting opinions, or memories. We look to create experiences that inspire awe and wonder.

OPEN CITY LONDON

We are an independent, not for profit organisation that aims to be at the centre of creating better places – and a better city. We champion excellence in design quality and advocate for an inclusive and informed approach to the development of our city.

Our work covers 3 core strands:

• Engagement
• Education 
• Enabling

With a basis of experience, expertise and research built up over 20 years, our programmes are designed to encourage dialogue, debate and learning about how architecture and public space affects our daily lives, and to enable people to discover and understand how they can really influence change in the built environment.
We are the only organisation that actively involves such a variety of stakeholders across London, connecting up those that plan, design and build the city to those that live, work and play in the city, both through our own action research and in our advocacy, education and engagement programmes.


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.