European Cultural Foundation Idea Camp 2015

Connected Action for the Commons IdeaCamp2015 Build the City 23–25 September 2015 • Botkyrka • Sweden Connected Action for the Commons IdeaCamp2015 Build the City 23–25 September 2015 • Botkyrka • Sweden 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Build(ing) the City in 50 Ideas by Katherine Watson, Director, European Cultural Foundation (ECF) 5 Welcome to Subtopia in Botkyrka by Karin Lekberg, Managing Director, Subtopia 6 Telephones, Decay and Creative Rebirth: 100 years of Subtopia People & Ideas 7 9 Connected Action for the Commons 72 Speakers & Facilitators 84 Botkyrka City Makers 104 Meet the Idea Camp Team 106 About the Idea Camp and R&D Grants 110 3 4 Build(ing) the City in 50 Ideas by Katherine Watson, Director, European Cultural Foundation Idea Camp 2015 follows our highly successful Idea Camp that was held in Marseille in 2014 on the theme of ‘Public Space’. It has been co-developed by ECF and the six hubs in our Connected Action for the Commons programme (see page 72). This year, the Idea Camp will be hosted by Subtopia in Botkyrka, near Stockholm in Sweden. The theme of Idea Camp 2015 is ‘Build the City’. Gathering together 50 inspirational Idea Makers from all across Europe, the Idea Camp is a collaborative working platform – a safe and open space for sharing and co-creation that addresses some of the most urgent challenges facing our continent today. The Idea Makers will be joined by some of Europe’s key thinkers, community hubs, some of the most engaged foundations, city developers and policy-makers – forming a wider community of practice with a shared commitment to strengthening the commons. This year, our Idea Makers were selected from 400 applications and they come from 23 diferent countries from across Europe as well as neighbouring regions. They represent a range of sectors and their ideas ofer a myriad of topics and methodologies. ECF seeks to support these exciting ideas at an early stage in their development in order to catalyse new approaches and new solutions. There are ideas focused on climate change, sustainable urban planning and design, reclaiming public space, management of shared resources and open source design. There are also ideas for welcoming migrants and supporting inhabitants of the ‘invisible’ city, ideas for community healing and social cohesion in cities that have experienced divisive conlicts. In conjunction with the Idea Camp, we are proud to launch Build the City: Perspectives on Commons and Culture, a publication intended as an inspiration and a resource for change-makers working to reclaim the city or build participatory democracy and alternative governance models in Europe. With culture at its heart, Idea Camp 2015 is about applying the principles and ethics of the commons to the transformation of the city, its communities and its economy. It is about people creating more sustainable cities through social cooperation and active participation. Our Idea Camp examines the contribution that cultural approaches can bring to these issues. 5 Welcome to Subtopia in Botkyrka by Karin Lekberg, Managing Director, Subtopia Too many countries in Europe and the rest of the world are cutting their public spending on culture. Theatres, libraries and cultural centres are closing down, and the space available for artistic and cultural expression is dwindling. However, many city planners are more than aware of the impact that culture and art can have on the development of a neighbourhood. The efects of culture on growth are often emphasised. However, to reduce art just to this – the instrumental – is to rob it of its true power as a catalyst for change and a platform for new ideas. Subtopia is working in a similar area to many other organisations in Europe where functional housing and suburban dreams in the 1950s turned into socio-economic problem areas in the 1990s. A suburb of Stockholm, Alby has developed enormously over the last 20 years, partly due to an engaged population and a long-term political vision. One of the core themes in this development has been placing art alongside culture and initiating a changed approach to dialogues between citizens and politicians. We are truly proud to be hosting Idea Camp 2015 here in Alby in Botkyrka and to be able to engage with you – Idea Makers and invitees alike – to delve deeper into the city as a place for culture and democratic action. Not only is it our pleasure to join you at this smorgasbord of ideas, we would also like to invite you to comment on the surroundings and point us towards opportunities for change that we might have overlooked. We know from our work in circus that the outside eye can make all the diference. We hope you enjoy this Idea Camp and please feel free to talk to me or Subtopia staf, engage with each other, get lost in serious conversations on the value of grass, act silly, share experiences, learn from others, make progress! Together we can Build the City. 6 Telephones, Decay and Creative Rebirth: 100 years of Subtopia In 1895, telephone tycoon Lars Magnus Ericsson bought Alby Gård – a mansionlike building just 50 metres from Hangaren. At the age of 55, he wound up his telephone afairs and sold his shares. Like the farmer’s son he was, he then retired to a farm to begin tackling his real passion: improving Swedish agriculture with new technology in harmony with nature. One of the most modern barns of the early twentieth century was completed in 1910. Today the same barn provides the space for Subtopia’s main building. Subtopia’s party venue is called “The Loft” due to the simple fact that it was once a hayloft; and the Tower conference room was once the oice where the old tycoon sat back looking out over his property. Milking cows were lined up in rows between the pillars of what is now Restaurant Subtopia. Ericsson was an innovative fellow who liked tinkering and experimenting, and in that sense, the spirit of the place where he once worked has not changed at all. After Ericsson’s death, the farm remained a working farm until the area was home to light industry in the 1950s. Ultimately, the site fell into disrepair, and it was so run down by the early 1990s that Botkyrka municipality bought the building for one Swedish crown (around €0.10). Culture moves in A circus hall was built with support from the Swedish government and the municipality of Botkyrka. In the late 1990s, Cirkus Cirkör moved to the area. The renovation of the old barn was complete by 2002, when Kulturhuset Rotemannen was inaugurated. The building was home to seven associations at the time. In 2005, Kulturhuset Rotemannen took on a new guise as the suburban paradise, Subtopia. At the same time, the municipal Corporation Upplev Botkyrka AB was formed, which included both Subtopia and Lida Friluftsgård. In the years since its inauguration, Subtopia has expanded to encompass Hangaren Subtopia, the main theatre for Idea Camp 2015 – a former construction materials warehouse – and Gula Villan Subtopia, originally built as a summer home for Ericsson’s son, as well as several other nearby properties. Today, we provide a home to about 80 organisations, with around 200 people coming here to work and study every day. Crops may not grow here any longer, but our creative cluster is a place where creativity and culture can continue to thrive! 7 Network the school! Zuzana Tabackova 8 People & Ideas Meet the Idea Camp participants and get to know their ideas Michał Augustyn • Merve Bedir • Sophie Blake-Gallagher • Sophie Bloemen • Federico Brivio • Viviana Checchia • Nicolai Chirnev • Paul Currion • Margot Deerenberg • Stefania del Torso • Mae Durant Vidal • Loïc Fel • Daniel García • Elvira Gizatullina • Ana Gonçalves • Ale González • Dzmitry Herylovich • Julia Heslop • Eliza Hoxha • Salvatore Iaconesi • Tamar Janashia • Reem Khedr • Josephine Leclercq • Lea Linin • Juan Lopez-Aranguren • Miguel Magalhães • Wojtek Matejko • Silviu Medeșan • Nela Milic • Anel Moldakhmetova • Silvia Nanclares • Anders Nilsson • Truls Nord • Sabina Ostermark • Laura M. Pana • Irina Paraschivoiu • Igor Ponosov • Laura Popplow • Galina Raguzina • Ylva Rancken-Lutz • Mohab Saber • Pedro Salguero • Antonia Schwarzmeier • Antonio Sforna • Frédéric Sultan • Zuzana Tabackova • Steve Threlfall • Bea Varnai • Gökçe Su Yoğurtçuoğlu • Razvan Zamira 9 People & Ideas 1 OMNICITIZEN Making Participation a Habit I propose a set of tools for urban adhocracy groups that will advance the sharing of knowledge and collaborative production of ideas on sustainable urban development. It is designed to engage a wide group of concerned citizens, for whom the process of participation is currently not accessible. The idea consists of two complementary components. The irst one is an online tool for creating knowledge commons on urban activism in theory and practice, in which every contribution is authored and acknowledged. This tool will be accompanied by an oline equivalent in the form of open bulletin boards in public space as well as printed manuals. The second component is a participatory process of idea generation and selection. It consists of a series of amusing workshops designed with the use of interactive models, resource mapping, games etc. The results will then be reined and turned into concrete proposals by a working group of experts, activists and workshop participants, and subsequently presented to the initial workshop group. After the discussion, the working group will continue developing proposals based on feedback. Michał Augustyn Poland - wymiennik.org I am a social activist and cultural animator based in Warsaw. In 2012 I created wymiennik.org, a mutual credit scheme that soon became the largest such initiative in Poland. I am a board member of the Commons Lab, a foundation for the urban commons. I am also a member of Open Jazdów, an initiative for community governance of a quarter of wooden houses in downtown Warsaw. Through the Commons Lab we are in the process of creating a community garden there. Recently I have been heavily engaged in building a coalition of local citizen groups to oppose privatisation and poor management (City – A Common Cause). The coalition aims to craft a common positive plan for the sustainable development of Warsaw, with direct democracy at its heart. 10 2 Bostan A Garden for All Today, the number of refugees in the world is more than 50 million, the highest recorded since World War II. Turkey is the biggest refugee hosting country in the world, with 2 million Syrian refugees. Current systems make refugees into mere consumers. Some locals even see them as parasites. The debate about refugees varies from integration to xenophobia, where refugees aren’t given the possibility to speak for themselves. This also means an economy running only on aid, simply because refugees aren’t allowed to work; most can’t beneit from health and education services of the states where they are seeking asylum. Refugees need support, but the understanding of ‘support’ has to shift from humanitarian aid to living together, sustainability and empowerment. This project develops Bostan: A Garden for All, a garden+kitchen+restaurant project run by refugees for Gaziantep (Turkey) inhabitants, endorsed by artists and architects, supported by NGOs. Bostan creates a vocational education environment and also has socio-economical value for refugees. Refugees’ role/perception in society transforms from the guest to the host. An idea of common(s) evolves around the garden. Merve Bedir Netherlands - landandcc.com I am an architect and researcher. I am a partner of the Rotterdam/Istanbul-based oice, Land+Civilization Compositions and a PhD candidate at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture. I graduated from Middle East Technical University (2003). Having practised in design/ construction projects in Turkey, Egypt, Georgia until 2008, I moved to Rotterdam for my PhD. I was a curator for the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2012), producing Agoraphobia and other projects on urban transformation and reuse. Currently, I’m researching issues of migration and common(s). I curated Vocabulary of Hospitality for Studio X Istanbul, which will be published as a book by dprBarcelona. I am curating One Architecture Week in Plovdiv in Bulgaria, under the title Un-common River. I have also published in uncube, Shanghai Flaneur, Interartive, Volume, MONU, Docomomo and Quaderns. I blog for Cairobserver, Failed Architecture. 11 People & Ideas Peace Walls 3 Despite their location in the city centre, the focus areas of the Peace Walls Project are called The Fountain and Bishop Street; one Protestant area, one Catholic area divided by a Peace Wall. Recently our project began exploring new and exciting ways of building capacity and developing the local area with a resident-centred strategy. We now urgently need a platform where residents can drop in, engage with community workers and socialise with people from the other side of the interface whilst discussing and promoting heritage and culture. By establishing a heritage and culture group, we hope to have an enthusiastic tier of residents who will learn about each other’s culture and help guide a strategy for improvement. By reclaiming underused spaces in the local area and creating a hub that is suitable for the heritage group alongside tea/cofee/sandwich-making facilities, we hope that residents will eventually be able to facilitate the heritage group themselves and it could have the potential to become a cross-community social economy. Sophie Blake-Gallagher Ireland I currently work on the Peace Walls Project in Derry, Ireland in a post funded by The International Fund for Ireland. Northern Ireland has many peace walls that have separated Protestant and Catholic communities since the troubles. I currently work as a development worker in an interface area to promote dialogue between Protestant and Catholic communities to make physical change to the peace wall that separates them. Previously I was a youth development worker and an English language teacher. My current position has allowed me and my team to explore ways of uniting residents in a divided society by embracing the similarities as opposed to diferences between Protestant and Catholic communities. 12 4 Principles for Urban Commons Throughout Europe we are witnessing a blossoming of the practice of commoning in the urban environment – transformations of urban space through temporary and permanent civic interventions, people claiming and engaging with public space, often through urban community and art projects. These interventions matter; they create social value. Although widespread, the current institutional or legal landscape does not acknowledge this value: there is no institutional framework for the commons. As such it is unnecessarily hard to start, sustain and manage such projects or processes. Also, any value created is often extracted and monetised by commercial or public entities, while the social value is lost. This project will explore a ‘set of rules’ to allow for and protect this local-urban commoning: it seeks to identify principles and design rules that would facilitate commons initiatives and protect the social value created. Such principles will allow us to point towards concrete policy interventions on a local, national and European level. Sophie Bloemen Germany - commonsnetwork.eu I co-founded the Commons Network, a civil society initiative based in Berlin and Brussels that promotes access to knowledge and other social and ecological causes from the perspective of the commons. I have worked with a variety of civil society organisations on issues ranging from utopia to intellectual property rights. Before coming to Berlin in 2013, I lived in San Francisco where I explored and wrote about commons-related social initiatives. With a background in political economy and philosophy, I am a strategic advisor to NGOs on trade and health policy, focusing on European as well as global developments. 13 People & Ideas QX1 – Migrant Community Docking Pilot 5 Our idea is to promote the empowerment and integration of migrants in Marseille by creating a participative information-sharing platform, available in multiple languages, based on migrants’ needs and experiences. Our purpose is to centralise the information, to reinforce existing information-sharing networks and to create new ones. The platform will be the result of workshops and interviews with both recently-arrived and established migrants, but also with professionals and volunteers working in migrant reception and with inhabitants who feel concerned. The goal is to collect and share knowledge, advice and tips that are useful to new migrants during their arrival and stay in Marseille. The irst series of workshops will allow us to identify the subjects our platform will need to contain and to design the appropriate set of media (website, magazine, neighbourhood desks, radio programmes, audiovisual materials etc.). We believe that experience sharing and collective action will help migrants who are facing the helplessness and exclusion generated by a heavy and complex bureaucracy. We also believe that this project will promote the sense of belonging, empowerment and self-conidence of those who participate. Federico Brivio France Transbordeur is a group of professionals from diferent ields – urbanists, social workers, artists, mediators, participatory process designers, map-makers – who came together around the will to question our professional practice and to make our actions meaningful. Our aim is to develop creative projects that enable minority voices to be heard. To achieve this goal, our approach is to emphasise individual life stories and to create new environments that are favourable to sharing and co-construction. A bridge between art and society, Transbordeur encourages the creation of social links and promotes popular education values, in order to improve people’s living conditions, mental and cultural development and civic empowerment. The group produces innovative participatory projects through an artistic and multi-media approach. 14 QX1 – Migrant Community Docking Pilot Federico Brivio 15 People & Ideas 6 Botanic Concrete Botanic Concrete (BC) starts from the belief that the development of the cityscape is most relevant, responsive and fulilling when initiated from perceptions of the complexity of its existing environs. BC will provide a pedagogical platform whereby people of any age will be able to ‘Build the City’ by producing new urban knowledge – one based on the heterogeneous proiles, skills and imaginations of the participants. The project will seek to re-empower the citizen’s capacity to establish the narrative and designate the utility of their shared environment in a manner that is not deferential to the architect and/or city planner. BC will be activated through Participatory Action Research, developing a series of non-outcome-driven workshops and exercises with participants of diferent ages, genders, nationalities and legal status. Taking as a starting point the historical legacy of John Latham and the Artist’s Placement Group, the participants will be encouraged to acknowledge what currently ‘exists’ in a mapping of the contemporary civic fabric. Crucially an outcome is not a prerequisite of the workshops and exercises. Viviana Checchia United Kingdom I am the new Public Engagement Curator at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow. Prior to taking up my role at CCA, I produced a range of international projects including curating the Young Artist of the Year Award 2014 (YAYA) at the A.M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah, which supports young Palestinian artists and artists of Palestinian descent, with a curatorial focus on the process of learning and developing. I was part of a curatorial team of more than 40 people that produced the 4th Athens Biennale, which re-imagined the model of a biennale as a space for cultural debate and grassroots organising. The Biennale was awarded the 2015 European Cultural Foundation Princess Margriet Award for Culture. For the past three years, I have been co-director of vessel (Puglia, Italy). 16 Summer Cinema in Open Air 7 This project has been our dream for the past ive years. Although the Soviet era ended in Moldova 24 years ago, the way we think and live is still Soviet. Very often, people here are afraid of any changes or new things. That is why we want to organise a summer cinema in the open air in our public park in Chișinău, in the square where an old Soviet theatre already exists, although it has not been working for 20 years. Our open air cinema will be a place where young people can gather to chat, to share their opinions, to participate in diferent activities, to listen to music or just to relax. It will be a place where our young people will discuss their ideas about how to build a new and lourishing community. Nicolai Chirnev Moldova My nickname is “Kolea” and I am from Moldova, a small country that urgently needs big changes. I am a student and everything new attracts me. I believe that each of us is capable of many great things. The most important thing is to always believe in yourself. The world is ours! Every day, new ideas appear in my head and this is one of them... 17 People & Ideas 8 New Digital Finance for Communities Despite a strong tradition of public housing during the Socialist era, but following total privatisation in 1992, access to afordable housing poses an insurmountable challenge in Belgrade. ‘Traditional’ inancial mechanisms and products do not meet the needs of a wide section of the urban population to inance their homes and to replace the rapidly ageing housing stock that many Eastern European countries possess. New approaches are unlikely to come from government or the private sector. We propose to adapt the cooperative (‘zadruga’) tradition based on an innovative inancial model. We seek to explore how proven approaches (local currencies, community bonds, local exchange schemes) can combine with new crypto-currency technologies to support community housing. We hope that the assumptions and conclusions of this research will be tested through a future outreach programme to communities in Belgrade to discuss their needs, in order to develop the idea for the widest possible audience. This is relevant not just in Serbia, but across all of Europe, given the wider housing crisis in countries including Greece and Spain. Paul Currion Serbia - kogradigrad.org I am a consultant working at the intersection of humanitarianism, urbanism and culture. I have an MSc in Architecture, specialising in environmental and energy studies. I live in Belgrade, Serbia where I am a member of Ko Gradi Grad and other urban initiatives that work on improving the built environment in the Balkans. I am also a writer whose iction and non-iction has been published in The White Review, Granta online, Aeon, Nature and other magazines; I write a regular column for the IRIN humanitarian news website. I have previously worked in post-disaster countries including Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and have recently written a guide to humanitarian needs assessment in urban areas. 18 9 Synaps Synaps creates access and gives new meaning to formerly unused resources of the built urban environment through a matchmaking service – connecting owners with new users, connecting spaces with ideas. We plan to set up a multifunctional virtual platform that provides an innovative tool for vacancy management. Primarily we aim to establish urban development with an up-cycling motive, based on innovative collaboration and social entrepreneurship models. This is established by a chain of qualitative temporary use projects that let start ups, associations, artists, students and initiatives beneit from afordable space and a network as a spring board to become successful. Real estate owners are also reassured and triggered to temporarily delegate their empty spaces, by demonstrating actual projects and results, standardised contracts and various campaigns. Pilot projects, functioning as laboratory spaces, are set up in which societal challenges are tackled by the crossfertilisation of existing or proposed research (theses, dissertations etc.) and vacant buildings and plots. The outcome of these application models are open source, adaptable ‘greenprints’ that tap into the full potential of former ‘urban gaps’. Margot Deerenberg Austria - paradocks.at I am an urban sociologist and human geographer. I am co-initiator of ONORTHODOX, a collective for participatory action research, and have worked in Istanbul, Shanghai, Skopje, Tirana and Vienna. As well as participation and empowerment, I apply methods of storytelling and mapping, and create outputs designed to be low threshold in order to reach a wide public. Since 2012, I have been organising various temporary use projects to actively demonstrate the potential of these ‘urban rest-products’. This led to the association PARADOCKS and its irst project DAS PACKHAUS, a multifunctional 4200m2 building. PARADOCKS aims to establish more such ‘laboratory spaces’ in which operational work is nourished by a think tank that implements research and creates formats to stimulate public discourse. 19 Synaps Margot Deerenberg 20 10 Sustainable Urban Art for Development Commercial interests are slowly changing the local, historical identity of the city, highlighting the diference between the historical downtown and suburbs even further. The development of a modern, community driven form of art can help to achieve the uniication of the city as a whole, eliminating its disparities and raising a sense of belonging and shared values among the community. Suburban inhabitants will no longer be regarded as second class citizens, ashamed of living in disadvantaged areas. Street art will contribute to making these areas tourist hot spots. This will contribute to the economic growth of these areas and develop a sense of belonging and pride among local residents. The existing, unique cultural heritage will be revitalised through modern art and recovered by the rampant gentriication process. Through the development of a sustainable form of street art that supports recycling, minimises CO2 emissions and the use of chemical substances, as well as limiting disposable waste, we want to raise awareness about ecological problems that are afecting the city. Stefania del Torso Ukraine I am a tourism marketing expert currently working in Lviv (Ukraine) for the Tourism Department. I always wanted to be very international so, after graduating abroad, I started working in international projects in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Basically my work consists of making a location a potential and attractive tourism destination, or to help organisations enter the market and develop the right skills for competing once they are on the market. I’ve been mainly working in countries in transition like Tajikistan, Georgia and now Ukraine. I am mostly focusing on how to turn Lviv into a sustainable street art mecca of Eastern Europe (which is what I am working on lately). 21 People & Ideas 11 Agronautas: RUrban Biotic Regenerations Agronautas is a long-term action-research project that reformulates the relationship between people and the natural environment. We search for the BIOTIC REGENERATION of RURBAN SPACE by reformulating connections between urban and rural environments and the natural capital they share through people cooperation. The project is developed through [ECOLOGICAL URBAN INFRASTRUCTURES]. We develop urban acupunctural interventions that consist of innovative DIY/DIT (do-it-yourself and do-it-together) Open Source equipment that minimise the consumption of energy and resources and integrate biodiversity in cities. They integrate living organisms: urban farming, insects and microorganisms; rain harvesting and water phytodepuration systems; renewable energy production; reuse and waste transformation. Existing citizen networks related to ecological and self-management practices get involved in open and free participation processes where we develop these ecological infrastructures and think about their management as part of the urban commons. These ecological urban infrastructures are linked to new practices and knowledge that are transferred to their users through activities (workshops, conferences etc.) and documents (digital manuals and physical panels). Mae Durant Vidal Spain - pezestudio.org Pezestudio is a creative cell of architects created in 2006 that develops urbanism, architecture, design and action-research projects. We design objects, tools, spaces and practices that promote minimum human impact on the environment, social development, research and production of innovative construction techniques and collaborative contexts. We develop the Inteligencias Colectivas (as part of Zoohaus Platform) and Agronautas project. We have worked on exhibitions, conferences and workshops in European, Asian and Latin American countries, in collaboration with several institutions (MoMA NY, MAK Vienna, Medialab Prado and Matadero Madrid, AECID (Spanish agency for international co-operation and development), Universities in Chile, Peru, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua...) We have been awarded the 1st Arquia Próxima Prize 2012, 1st Prize VII Caribbean Architecture Biennial and 1st Prize in XI Santo Domingo Architecture Biennial. As part of Zoohaus, we collaborated in the Uneven Growth Exhibition at MoMA NY. 22 Mae Durant Vidal Agronautas: RUrban Biotic Regenerations 23 People & Ideas ArtCOP21 Loïc Fel 24 ArtCOP21 12 The UN Conference on Climate (COP21) will take place in the northern suburbs of Paris in December 2015. In this context, Coalition for art and sustainable development (COAL) wants to mobilise, through the arts, the actors from the diferent cities in this area to raise awareness of ecological issues and to re-think the role of culture in city planning. COAL wants these suburbs to become green models and to erase the political and social stigma they carry. In collaboration with the local actors, COAL will develop two lines of relection and creation based on existing initiatives: • • The (re)integration of nature in the city and the relation between biodiversity and climate change. With the artist Olivier Darné, COAL would like to create an urban wood, the new ‘green lung’ of Paris. The aesthetic approach of cities’ transformations, metropolitan streams and urban metabolism. This relection accompanies Stefan Shankland’s approach of “high artistic and cultural quality”, around the extension of the subway from Paris to the city of Aubervilliers in Seine-Saint-Denis and its impact on the reconiguration of space. Loïc Fel France - projetcoal.org With a PhD from the Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), the aim of my research is to deine the changes in the perception and the aesthetics of nature induced by the development of scientiic ecology. Convinced that philosophy cannot be summarised only in research, it is through the implementation of sustainable development practices in business that I put my beliefs to the test. Chief Sustainability Oicer at BETCs since 2008, I have been able to deploy an internal programme but also to work on eco-design and social responsibility during the production of advertisements, as well as designing ofers for advertisers. I am also the President and co-founder of COAL. 25 People & Ideas 13 El solar de la Puri El Solar de la Puri, a regenerated lot in Barcelona, is the connecting hub of a diverse constellation of local projects, together constructing an innovative organisational model of neighbourhood autonomy. The lot connects four projects together, forming a resilient local ecology: Taller de Ficció, cccbarri, Laboratorio Reversible and Hort de la Puri. These projects – consisting of local activists, artists and neighbours – are working to construct a space that functions as a catalyst for interaction and the collaborative development of resources. Taller de Ficció started documenting the present and past of the street, ilming the demolition of three buildings in 2013. It is the site of this demolition that is the current location of the Solar de la Puri. In 2014 an outdoor cinema was created here. The documentation of the street is projected publicly and discussed among neighbours. In 2015 a ilm lab and a vegetable garden were started and trees were planted. The garden was designed not only for food production but also as a site for playful social experimentation. Daniel García Spain - tallerdeficcio.barripoblesec.org Taller de Ficció has been working with public space and memory in Poble Sec, Spain since 2012. Our previous project centred around a public square, Plaza Navas. We were supported by a regional fund for young artists and collaborated with local activist groups such as Repensar Poble Sec (a local branch of the 15M movement) and Trocasec (a barter market promoting social economy). Three short narrative/ documentary ilms featuring archive material and interviews with residents, a guided route, a collective cartography and some other actions on public space were made to call attention to the controversial renewal plan in which a car park was built beneath the square. The results were shown and debated in diferent neighbourhood spots. 26 El solar de la Puri Daniel García 27 People & Ideas OPEN AND CONNECT 14 The historic heart of St. Petersburg is made up of enclosed territories of diferent scales that lack social cohesion and diversity. The main idea is to reopen and re-connect the city tissue through regenerating the collapsed networks and activating the cooperation of citizenship. We are focusing on the inner yards of residential blocks and some retail areas. We think that making them open and strongly connected to the city again means bringing traditions back to life that will eventually enrich our public realm. We propose applying a comprehensive approach that enables us to improve the physical environment, to propel the economic development through local productivity forms, and to create a system for the long-term stewardship of resources. They will eiciently contribute to preserving shared values and community identity, culture and the heritage of St. Petersburg, as well as to strengthen self-government at the local level. We irmly believe that the projected approach will help to open and connect the historic part of such a great city as St. Petersburg. Elvira Gizatullina Spain - www.gs-group.com - www.technopolis.gs I am the Deputy Director for Strategic Development for the Russian investment and industrial holding company GS Group. I also work on formulating territory development for private technopolis in a small city in the Kaliningrad region for ‘Technopolis GS’, a unique private innovation cluster facilitating generation, development and the implementation of innovative ideas. I also develop Technopolis’s cultural and entertainment infrastructure to create an attractive environment. I hold a Master’s of Science in Geography (2008) from St. Petersburg State University, Russia and a Master’s of Urban Design (2015) from BarcelonaTech, Spain. My research interests include urban planning, city development, city branding, creative cities, regional diagnostics and analysis, city infrastructure development and quality of urban life. 28 Welcome to The Living Room! Laura M. Pana 29 People & Ideas 15 The Ageless City Urban spaces are often designed for the appropriation of active adults, thus removing the need to serve and accommodate people throughout the entire lifecycle. This transdisciplinary and intergenerational project thus seeks to open up new modes of inquiry and question existing epistemologies by bringing together younger and senior residents in learning communities where they can relect on ways to improve the appropriation of urban spaces and convey them in arts and humanities-based projects and activities. These intergenerational learning spaces and practices, which will take place in diferent European cities, will provide more opportunities for people of all ages to meet and share, promote capacity building, and foster a sense of place and belonging that will contribute to participatory citizenship and the empowerment of local communities in urban public life. By breaking new ground on the discussion of fundamental questions related to the appropriation of the physical environment and everyday sociability in contemporary urban settings, this idea endorses a rhetoric that yields more liveable and inclusive ways of building cities and communities in a globalised world. Ana Gonçalves Portugal I am a lecturer at the Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies (ESHTE) and a senior researcher at the Centre for Geographical Studies, Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon (CEG/IGOT/ULisbon), in Portugal. I hold a European PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies and my doctoral thesis addressed the cultural and social reinvention of Cardif, the capital of Wales, in recent decades. I am particularly interested in transdisciplinary approaches to the appropriation of space, namely those generated at the grassroots levels, and have been conducting research on the proactive mobilisation of local communities in small contemporary cities. 30 16 Grrr Grrr is a strategy that enables and supports the management and reuse of physical resources such as construction materials by connecting supply and demand between self-managed urban projects and public and private companies and institutions. The project will take the form of a set of protocols, agreements and manuals, and a digital tool that will make it possible to visualise supply and demand, manage and monitor resources, and calculate the resulting environmental impact. This project grew out of a working group in Arquitecturas Colectivas, an open network of individuals and collectives who share an interest in participatory open source construction of the built environment, the right to the city, self-managed spaces, and citizen empowerment. By connecting supply and demand, these types of strategies favour the creation of alternative, collaborative and social economies and empower self-managed initiatives. Ale González Spain - wwb.cc An architect, programmer and digital artist, I’m interested in issues regarding the selfmanagement and technological sovereignty of communities, the creative and empowering possibilities of technology and the defence and extension of the commons sphere. I work in wwb, formerly known as hackitectura.net, an Andalusian cooperative that works with free software, free hardware and open standards, ofering technological and communication services in the ields of art, architecture and social movements. 31 People & Ideas 17 Rolling Knowledge Rolling Knowledge is a mobile school/laboratory of applied skills: for life, art, handcraft and management for people of every age and education level living in one rural area. We work to develop local rural communities in terms of a modern city concept. We perceive the ‘City’ as a vivid constant interaction of communities and subcultures and their capacity to act together in solving common issues. The project will ofer skills that people can acquire and share and implement, in their area or through becoming part of another City. Our goal is to shift understanding of the City of rural dwellers from old – ‘the place to earn money’ to new – ‘modern living standards and diversity of life images’. Here we mean those living standards that allow a person to live with dignity anywhere, developing skills and practices that are common among urban citizens today and allow them to have economic, environmental and social sustainability. Dzmitry Herylovich Belarus - ecohome-ngo.by I was born in Belarus. I spent over six years abroad during my BA and MA studies. My academic interests are sustainable urban development and night-life economy. I followed these interests after my studies and found supporters in Belarus, working with the NGO ‘Ecohome’. Two years ago, we started a public campaign ‘Urban Forester’ to protect urban green areas from developers as this became a huge issue in recent years in Belarus. I have devoted most of my time to this campaign in the position of project manager. My other activity is non-formal education for children. I run ‘healthy food’ workshops and quests in urban environments. Before this, I was a freelance web developer. 32 18 Postcards from Home This idea aims to challenge the dilution of urban identity, the generic, commerciallyoriented imagery of regeneration campaigns in European cities to create alternative visions of place through collective, bottom-up strategies. Citizens are invited to rediscover and challenge preconceptions about the seemingly ‘familiar territory’ of their neighbourhood through collective acts. Two ‘hubs’ in two diverse communities of Newcastle will each facilitate a network of residents to build alternative, collaborative maps of the opposite neighbourhood using self-produced postcards. Circulating around each network, the postcards will be modiied, participants editing previous actions, creating non-authorial imagery of non-iconic, everyday locations, so individual and collective visions blur to build new, intricate narratives of everyday life in each neighbourhood. As these self-produced visions become saturated with text and image, they will be used to form two metaphorically and physically layered maps in each ‘hub’, creating alternative narratives of place, helping to bridge psychological boundaries between communities. As an evaluation, residents will co-produce forums – chances to relect upon these new mapped visions and the experience of collectively deconstructing/reconstructing place. Julia Heslop United Kingdom/Italy - juliaheslop.com I am an artist/writer based in Newcastle, UK. I am undertaking a PhD in Human Geography at Durham University, which aims to understand what lessons can be learnt from participatory and informal housing practices in Albania for the UK social housing context. The potentials for deep participation in recreating the urban environment are at the heart of my practice, which spans large-scale architectural installation and video. My commissions include work for Up the Wall festival of live arts, Chester Castle and the Hortillonnages loating gardens, Amiens, France. I have presented work at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, The Nordic Embassy, Berlin and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. I recently curated Urban Organisms, an exhibition/events programme at The NewBridge Project, Newcastle, which examined urban food sustainability. 33 People & Ideas Zipping Mitrovica 19 Mitrovica is a city in Kosovo that was divided after the war of 1999. Since then the two communities of Albanians and Serbs claim the same territory. Both communities hardly communicate with each other. For them the bridge is the end of the city, the check point. Some even don’t think about the bridge at all. The city divided in two parts was recently legitimised by the new border municipalities. We would like to work on the area of the river, which ofers a potential, a place to be, although here it’s a border and the end of the city for each of the two communities. First we would like to map the space, its potentials and obstacles by organising a regional Balkan workshop for students of arts and architecture to frame a vision together with local actors. A conference on divided cities will also help to open up a productive debate from the bottom up perspective. Eliza Hoxha Austria I am an architect by profession, recently a PhD candidate at Technical University of Graz in Austria. As well as working in the University of Pristina, I am a well-known artist, urban planner and activist in Kosovo. I write a lot about urban culture and recently published a book The City and Love dedicated to the urban challenges of post-Socialist Pristina. I was awarded by the Association of Kosovo Architects for promoting education and architecture in Kosovo in 2011; from the Balkan Network BELLS as an environmental ambassador of Kosovo in 2011; as Volunteer of the Year from USAID in 2013, for awareness contribution for girls and women in Kosovo in 2013. I am a director of the upcoming social platform for urban research, Urbaniak. 34 NORTH MITROVICA SOUTH MITROVICA Zipping Mitrovica Eliza Hoxha 35 People & Ideas 20 The Relational Ecosystem The Relational Ecosystem is a technological system, a place in the city (the Lab) and a series of practices, learned through a peer-to-peer education process. People (citizens, designers, researchers, activists, artists...) come to the Lab at the Relational Ecosystem to learn how to gain knowledge about the relational architecture of the active communities in their city, and how to use such knowledge to make things happen. They will understand the lows of information, opinion and emotion across all active communities, and the roles people play in them. This knowledge will enable people to come together to co-design participatory, inclusive and engaging actions and strategies; to make shared decisions about the use of public space, or design new public spaces online; to gain better understanding about what unites communities; what expresses their identity; how they collaborate (or not); how inclusion (or separation) happens. This will be used to create viable, participatory, inclusive and sustainable models, services and processes, social enterprises or peer-to-peer collaboration practices. Salvatore Iaconesi Italy - human-ecosystems.com I am an artist, designer, robotic engineer and hacker. I am the founder of Art is Open Source and CEO of Human Ecosystems. I teach Near Future Design at ISIA Design University in Florence. I am a TED Fellow, Eisenhower Fellow and Yale World Fellow. 36 21 New Life for Old Areas Currently Tbilisi (the capital of Georgia) is home to numerous industrial buildings that lost their purpose with the decline in industrial production around 20 years ago. These buildings are mostly located on the periphery of the city and are surrounded by poor neighbourhoods with no cultural spaces. The cultural centre of the city is heavily concentrated around its older part (a very touristic area), leaving people from the marginalised areas with no sense of belonging or any cultural reference points to be proud of. They don’t perceive themselves as having any inluence over the part of the city they live in and have no idea how to contribute to its sustainable development and transformation into an attractive and interesting location that relects their cultural identity. The project aims to investigate opportunities for expanding the cultural centre of the city, creating new cultural hubs in the former industrial buildings (such as cultural and technological incubators, compounds with multiple oices for cultural industries etc.), involving local communities in decision-making process concerning their surroundings. Tamar Janashia Georgia - cumalab.org.ge I am the founding Director of a Tbilisi-based non-proit organisation called Culture and Management Lab, which is active in the realm of arts and cultural exchange. We work on issues of cultural policy and the strategic development of creative industries in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. I also work as a freelance business consultant, providing services to various local and international organisations, academic institutions and private companies in the ields of general management, project management and development. I completed my MBA studies at the University of Maine, USA (2005-2007) and hold a BA from the Tbilisi State University, Georgia in the ield of classical philology (Old Greek and Latin languages). 37 People & Ideas City Castles/ Invisible Shadows 22 Throughout wider Europe’s urban spaces, there are many unused, decaying buildings that are locked up and not accessible to citizens – whether these are postindustrial remnants or castles. At the same time, young people and independent artists lack space to practice, rehearse and showcase their talents. Like the vacant buildings, partially with a history of local, national or regional relevance, creative youth are overlooked. In many cases, a disconnect to these urban spaces has occurred. Our proposition to “Build the City” and to tackle both issues (i.e. the neglect of existing buildings and the lack of space for young people to explore their creativity) revolves around the idea of revitalising buildings through artistic and cultural activities. The project aims to take best practices into consideration. Reem Khedr Egypt I graduated from the American University in Cairo (AUC) in December 2011 with a BA in Journalism and a Minor in Sociology. I’ve been working with not-for-proit organisations for more than three years including the Goethe Institute Cairo, Save the Children and Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement. Currently, I work as a Programme Coordinator at Mahatat for Contemporary Art. I’m also a member of the Cultural Innovators Network. 38 Fronteras 23 Fronteras is a project that allows local and international artists of all disciplines, as well as anyone who has a skill they would like to share, to engage with their community in a reciprocal learning experience. The project is introduced through a work-and-play residence festival in collaboration with local cultural and social centres working on the ground with a given community or area. It is mainly aimed at children and adolescents in risk areas but really is a methodology that connects at the pedagogical, artistic and community level and can be applied to any given community. It is important to diagnose in the irst instance which issues are being tackled by local organisations and activists. This involves identifying and working closely with people on the ground in order to support the work carried out and to inject new life into this work through an intensive collaboration with artists who will work directly within a local organisation. This festival then allows connections between diferent organisations working on similar issues and captures the social panorama of an area to develop future projects. Josephine Leclercq France With a French father and English mother, I was born in England and grew up in France before moving to London to study. I have worked in a variety of sectors but spend most of my time imagining small-scale and large-scale participatory events that bring people together and change their world view, just a little bit. After completing a Master’s degree in international relations, I met Khosro Adibi – an Iranian contemporary dancer – on a plane from Buenos Aires to Santiago de Chile. I participated in his Fronteras multidisciplinary arts festival and then decided to organise it in Buenos Aires. I have recently returned to France and now wish to introduce this experience here. 39 People & Ideas 24 Up and About Project The Up and About Project will assign regular citizens the role of cultural creators by having them actively participate in the process of ‘cultural rejuvenation’ of their neighbourhoods. By creating a ‘mobile cultural hub’ – designed in collaboration with the Faculty of Architecture from the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University from Skopje – we intend to decentralise culture and bring it to the citizens’ backyard by having the hub at various neighbourhoods in Skopje for so-called neighbourhood residencies. Culture in Skopje is largely centralised and citizens have to travel to the city’s downtown if they want to participate in cultural activities. Another element that this project is trying to introduce is cultural programming by citizens for citizens – so that people do not have to be dependent on cultural institutions to create the programming for them – creating more accessible cultural experiences. Culture comes to life through social interactions and the mobile cultural hub will attempt to stimulate this aspect – creating instances for dynamic culture. Lea Linin Macedonia - instagram.com/skopjewanders/ I have more than ive years of working experience within the NGO sector in Macedonia, assisting in the coordination of and coordinating community development, youth and cultural projects. I also work as a researcher. My interests in this area are focused on the themes of urban ecology, politics of memory, national identities and cultural diversity. I hold a BA in Translation and Interpretation from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, and an MA in Cultural Policy and Management from University of Arts in Belgrade and Université Lumière Lyon 2 (UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy and Management), Belgrade, Serbia. I am currently working at PAC Multimedia, Skopje. 40 25 Young Curators to Heal a Neighbourhood By transforming an abandoned place into an open air cultural centre, the idea is to empower young people from the periphery of Madrid to manage the cultural life of their neighbourhoods. It will work by reclaiming existing cultural spaces abandoned on the outskirts of Madrid to be managed by young people. The project will create a network between the young curators to build a cultural belt in the periphery of Madrid. This network will be supported and nurtured by local and international experiences. Juan Lopez-Aranguren Spain - basurama.org I am an architect by training at the Politecnica University at Madrid and a founding member of Basurama, an artist collective dedicated to research, cultural and environmental creation and production whose practice revolves around the relection of trash, waste and reuse in all its formats and possible meanings. I have worked all over the world with the aim of ‘asking by doing’. My latest projects include Autobarrios (self-made neighbourhoods), a programme that helps to create an initiative for urban community development: it uses the collective construction of an urban imagination as a tool for empowering the community as a creative body. Throughout creative practices, the enhancement of local resources and networking, strategies to allow and encourage neightbours to activate their citizenship. 41 People & Ideas 26 PlataForma: Power to the Makers Seeking processes that allow European international networks to generate grass-roots projects might be the right way to tackle some real issues of our cities. What if a novel kind of multidisciplinary multicultural incubator sets itself in special premises in a deeply crisis-afected periphery? With the belief that citizens need ‘non-institutional’ spaces to gather, breed new models of thinking and create alternative solutions, we propose to convert an old abandoned prison into a European lab for creative communities; an open arena where craftsmen, musicians, ishermen, designers and other professionals ind space. More than a working place, PlataForma is to be a living space for encounters; a place where people can meet others they otherwise wouldn’t. We want to bring change-makers and locals together in a place of freedom and action-research, setting itself apart from typical co-working by generating models for social engagement. Through informal mutual learning-by-doing processes, people’s commitment can thus become both its engine and its direct result. By sharing and collaborating, we want to empower citizens to actively construct their own reality. Miguel Magalhães Portugal - casadovapor.org Portuguese by blood, I was raised in the dichotomy of the liberal education of my parents and the conservative background of a big traditional family from the North of Portugal. I was born in the US from the union of an India-born Portuguese mathematician and a Mozambique-born female architect. My holistic vision of the world makes me work with a wide range of diferent creative ields and teams between business, art and architecture. My belief in collaborative thinking and mutual learning processes turns me to collective intelligence experimentation in the search for new ways to grow. 42 27 Community Managed Areas Our idea is to create a reliable, co-operative and lexible management formula for Community Managed Areas – CMA (e.g. Metelkova, El Pumarejo, Jazdów). They are autonomous areas in the cities: cultural and social innovation centres managed by various communities: local, formal/informal organisations and cross-sectoral partnerships. Those areas are managed by the citizens who took matters into their own hands. It’s a radical form of participation. They are proving that public infrastructure can be used more efectively when there is a vision and social capital involved. Still, many communities lack the knowledge, resources and/or support to unleash the full potential of their CMAs. Because of our involvement in creating similar areas in Warsaw, we want to approach this issue in a methodical way. First, we wish to carry out Europe-wide case study research of existing CMAs. Next we will develop a model based on our indings and expert input. Last, we are planning to implement it in the Jazdów Settlement. Our work will help to create or improve similar areas in other cities (maybe even inluence new legislation). Wojtek Matejko Poland - facebook.com/jazdow I’m a socio-urban researcher, project coordinator and the president of Warsaw-based Flâneur Association. I’m involved in the activities of several informal community groups like Partnership for Jazdów Settlement, which I am representing for this project. Most of the time I’m working on diferent projects concerning urban spaces and civic participation. Here are some of them: a series of exploratory walks in Warsaw; ’inissage’ of Universam Grochow, which is the irst Warsaw shopping centre – built in the former regime and is now going to be demolished; creating a social enterprise for location- and context-speciic urban furniture designed and built with the participation of local communities. In the past, I was working as a strategy consultant and TV reporter. 43 People & Ideas LaFábrika detodalavida Pedro Salguero 44 28 SteKer – reactivation of Stejeriș village Villages developed around big cities play an important role in the economic and the cultural life of these cities. In Romania we worked a lot inside the city, trying to build an ‘urban culture’ although many citizens come from the villages outside the city. How about zooming out a bit and trying to analyse the relationship between the big cities and the depopulated villages around them? In order to test these relationships, I chose an abandoned village 40 km from Cluj: Stejeriș (in Hungarian Kercsed). The situation of this village relects very well the depopulation problem that I think is already a symptom in Europe. The issue I try to emphasise is the way these villages can be ‘rebuilt’ using the city’s resources and proximity. I propose a cross-disciplinary project, SteKer based in Stejeriș, that tries to bring together young professionals from Cluj (socio-anthropologists, artists, architects, landscape designers) and inhabitants living in the village, local organisations and local authorities that can tackle together issues like social relations in rural areas, rural landscape and local economy. Silviu Medeșan Romania I live and work as an architect in Cluj, Romania. I’m interested in design, art, architecture and crossdisciplinary intervention projects in public space. I co-curated Architecture Days Biennale in 2007 and 2009 as the President of the Architecture Students’ Association in Cluj. My multi-media project FoO0Oo0am (part of Superbia exhibition) participated in the Venice Biennale in 2010. I was also part of an art in public space exhibition Visible City, curated by AltArt (20112014). Since 2012, I’m working with the Colectiv A Association, based at Paintbrush Factory, as part of the project At the Playground – Shared Space in Mănăștur. Currently I’m a PhD Student at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism in Cluj with the action-research thesis Form follows situation – contemporary city as foreseen by stuationists. 45 People & Ideas 29 Flooded Memories In our project, Belgrade citizens and communities will re-enact the spirit of cooperation achieved during the lood when young people overwhelmed Red Cross and river banks with their interest in distributing donated goods or sand bags as barriers. Relying on the knowledge and experience of their elderly and designated organisations like NGOs or the army, Belgrade’s young people – largely unemployed, poor and living in inadequate conditions – rushed to help. In the misery of the environmental crisis, the collaboration of the state and its people (intergenerational, as well as regional cooperation) is a phenomenon worth reviving for capturing potential steps towards the prosperity of Serbia and its representation in the West. This progress was visible, but in the midst of the emergency, it was not recorded. I want to take people back to the solidarity that they showed towards each other and locate, identify and evaluate their urge to act together. The culture of democracy that emerged in the state of emergency challenged the everyday lethargy and hostility of the residents of Belgrade. Nela Milic United Kingdom My work centres on the theme of identity – lost and regained through leaving home. It explores the sense of belonging and the stages of adjustment to the new environment. Longing for home, the one left and that doesn’t exist anymore, is a childhood memory we can all relate to. This gives me a plethora of themes to develop in my artwork – past, roots, migration, displacement, resettlement... I present them in various formats; from ilm to fashion, from text to installation; from drama to photography. I particularly explore the use of digital mosaic, collage and patchwork. Drawing on imagery and the sound, I recall the memories of the place, age and circumstance and engage the contributors in producing visions and stories through those mediums. 46 30 City Education Network Education Network is a new format of educational system/network in the city, which tackles the issue of excess of free time and unrealised intellectual and personal potential of the citizen, as well as their need for social integration and self-development. The network is based on a sharing principle, user-generated educational content, accessibility and openness of educational resources and smart ways to spend leisure time. The system should also be self-sustainable, stimulating community building and the accumulation of social capital, and helping to develop the personal and professional growth of participants, as well as their social integration and active participation in creating new city events. The principle of user-generated content will help citizens to create and receive the type of educational content they really need, and not just become consumers, but creators. Knowledge sharing and an open education system together with active social networking can create a new type of self-sustainable community that is less dependent on the prevailing economic and political situation. Anel Moldakhmetova Kazakhstan I am a Kazakhstan-born cross-cultural communication expert, urban researcher and activist, working on projects involving community development, culture and the city. Since 2006, I have been involved in various international community development projects, related to cultural exchange, grassroots, social entrepreneurship, education and reprogramming public spaces in Russia, USA, Poland, Kazakhstan and Colombia. This includes developing the concept of a new type of social housing in Moscow city centre – “Residence Maximum”, for Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design; the creation of a special educational programme for migrants and local citizens on the basis of a public library in the south of Moscow; and the organisation of workshops on design thinking for the open educational platform TAMTAM, cross-cultural communication and soft skills for students in Poland (“Enter your Future” AIESEC Wroclaw). 47 People & Ideas 31 Caring IN the City Our project poses some questions such as: Is it possible to carry out collective research into the right to bring children up in the city? Can we express those indings creatively? Is it possible to bring up children collectively in modern cities? Can a participatory process help us create a community that nurtures this collective upbringing? Can we think together how we want to raise children in common? Are there urban commons that can foster these practices? Can we exercise our right to the city and reinvent it based on the principles of caring and cooperation? How can we strengthen our communities and urban public spaces? Through this process of research and creation we intend to redeine and reinvent the neighbourhood to make it more welcoming and child-friendly, a place where a community-based upbringing can be a reality. The project also aims to form a learning community that will be in charge of carrying out the research and the creative process. Silvia Nanclares Spain - blogs.zemos98.org/entornodeposibilidades/ I am a writer, pro-am publisher, cultural activist and literary geek. I work and carry out research in the ield of literature, the world of publishing and free culture, developing and promoting collective projects including Campus Relatoras, #bookcamping, an archive and publishing research group, and bucolicas.cc, where I published the short story collection titled El Sur: Instrucciones de Uso. I am a contributor to media such as Diagonal and eldiario.es. My blog is Entorno de Posibilidades. At the moment I am working at Medialab Prado developing research about free digital publishing. 48 32 Visutopia – Vision Laboratory To be able to be successful in creating sustainable societies, without depleting natural resources, there is a need to re-examine how to manage our resources in general. With resources meaning factors of production such as land, raw material, labour, technology, knowledge etc., Visutopia will be a laboratory and makerspace for processing sustainable production models. In the vision laboratory we intend to raise awareness of the Open Source concept as a general model for the production of goods and services. We will select and build Open Source Hardware products that best illustrate resource eiciency. In the hardware workshop others can also create their own Open Source products. The project will also participate in developing structures for the coordination of Open Source (OS) production such as the Open Food Network. Through the openness and transparency in OS production, resources and people’s creativity can be coordinated more efectively. We intend to give these matters attention by visualisation through creative methods and the arts. Anders Nilsson Sweden - visutopia.nu I’ve been writing and directing theatre at Teater K for 17 years. For the last six years we have been focused on the environment/climate situation and how to organise a sustainable economy. Both our social projects and performances have focused on these matters. During the three-year project Future Now, we employed experienced Live Action Role Play organisers, who created an event where people lived for several days in a ictitious ‘participatory economy’ society. I have previously worked with tutoring/coaching teachers and with CSR (corporate social responsibility). 49 People & Ideas Postcards from Home Julia Heslop 50 33 Sinnenas Parkour Eyesight is by far the most dominant sense that we humans have. It’s relected in urban surroundings as our cities predominantly consist of visual elements to be experienced with our eyes. But what happens if we allow ourselves to explore our surroundings through other senses as well or instead? Can a view be experienced without eyesight and does a city have a pulse, literally? How come water sometimes smells loud, a tiny square is experienced as stupendous, an escalator inspiring and a bus stop enchanting? By enhancing the awareness of perception through senses such as touch, sound and smell, we will explore and perceive the city in a diferent and possibly richer way. This in turn will give us a broader palette of tools when shaping our common habitats. The explorations and collective experiences of presence that we engage in within the project will be documented, edited and used at seminars as a foundation to discuss a variety of ideas on how we can create sound, inclusive and inspiring habitats for all. Truls Nord Sweden - flust.org I am a freelance photographer and artist, and co-founder of FLUST. From 2011 to 2014, I was the initiator and Project Manager for Taktil foto, a three-year project where people with deaf blindness learned to use photography as a way of communicating. From 1995 to 2009, I was a photographer at the Museum of Science & Technology in Stockholm. I have a BA in Photography from the London Institute (1994). 51 People & Ideas Transurbanistaz Sabina Ostermark 52 34 Transurbanistaz Transurbanistaz wants to spearhead game-changing in the identity formation of small- and medium-sized cities – going from policy-enforced identity to citizenthought identity. Enabling citizens to rethink what urban/suburban/rural is, strengthening social and cultural capital locally, empowering citizens to reclaim their role as a stakeholder in the city’s human ecosystem. The project’s aim is to create incentives to rethink and redeine place identity and the borders between urban, suburban and rural in the city of Karlstad. This will be done through a workshop tour and action plan where separate interactive cultural workshops with diferent urban/rural themes take place in diferent parts of the greater City of Karlstad region. A mixture of dialogue and performances co-arranged by locals, NGOs, public sector and local business will create foundations for citizen-based place identity, addressing the similarities in challenges and possibilities between urban, suburban and rural communities. This will act as a pilot for a longer term project focused on identity-transformation and cultural capital. Sabina Ostermark Sweden - civickarlstad.se I am a process-oriented project leader who has spent the last ten years or so leading and developing both short- and long-term projects within the ield of culture and democracy. I made Sweden’s irst big exhibition of fanzines and recently helped to organise Sweden’s biggest EPAtraktormeet in Tjörn municipality. My focus is often youth-based. I was raised in rural Sweden close to lake Vättern, and after many years in Stockholm and Göteborg I now live in Karlstad. 53 People & Ideas 35 Welcome to The Living Room! Welcome to The Living Room! is a series of cultural events aiming to improve social relationships between migrants, refugees and host communities across Europe. We want to transform urban spaces into public living rooms together with migrants, refugees and host communities. In these jointly designed spaces, the three communities share stories, experiences, impressions and solutions about migration in a mix of artistic forms: photography, storytelling, video projection, music, design, poetry etc. A discussion with the audience follows the presentations. We want to recreate the traditional residential spaces known for their informal, welcoming and socialising spirit to build a comfortable, intimate home for everybody, where these communities re-discover themselves; re-connect; challenge stereotypes and prejudices and ind inspiration to coexist peacefully. The irst migration lab public living room was organised in Vienna, Austria in March 2015. Our goal is to expand on new ideas and collaborations and continue this project in the Netherlands, Austria and Romania, gradually bringing in other European countries. Laura M. Pana Romania/The Netherlands/Austria - migrationlab.org I’m a Romanian social entrepreneur, currently based in The Hague, Netherlands after a seven-year stop in Vienna, Austria. I’m the founder of migration lab, a social startup that aims to improve perceptions of migration by uniting migrants, refugees and host communities through cultural, educational and social design projects across Europe. I have a professional background in communication and event management and an academic background in modern applied languages. I’m a storyteller, traveller, activist and occasional volunteer who’s passionate about languages, intercultural communication and stories of common people who inspire change. 54 36 Permanent Space, Temporary City Urban planning acts as a gatekeeper of land value, but it is also a brake on empowering citizens. In more traditionally top-down and centralised planning systems in particular, there is little space for communities to shape their cities. Between the approval and implementation of plans, land transactions or simply delayed public action, un-used or under-used land is a loss, both economically and for society, at large. Permanent Space, Temporary City aims to challenge the status quo and to create a framework for renegotiating temporary use of land within a city. It aims to: (1) create a user-generated online platform for mapping un-used or under-used land; (2) support citizens and community groups to acquire information and to deine temporary uses for three sites; (3) engage landowners/ developers of the three sites to allow and promote temporary uses. The ‘temporary city’ is a short-term place-making that can have a long-term impact in allowing communities to become involved in co-producing the city and giving room for small-scale temporary projects alongside major development ones. Irina Paraschivoiu Romania - odaiacreativa.ro I am a local and urban development professional. Having grown up in a small industrial town in central Romania, I became committed to improving the well-being of communities, working across sectors in capacity building, local development, culture and designing methodologies for participation in urban planning. I am co-founder/President of the Creative Room, a think tank based in Bucharest and a researcher under the Open Society Foundation’s Think Tank Young Professionals’ Development Programme. I hold an MSc in Regional Urban Planning from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in Communication Sciences and European Studies from the University of Bucharest/Maastricht. I am an alumni of Asia-Europe University (ASEFUAN). 55 People & Ideas 37 Participatory Urban Replanning Lab Visually my project has a normal shop/gallery exterior with an open entrance from the street. Big windows, signs and posters should invite people to use it. Inside the Participatory Urban Replanning Laboratory will be a working space for collaborative mapping, researching, discussion, workshops and lectures. The working process there will be self-organisation, where I’ll have a coordinating role. The studio will be working everyday like a shop, where we will invite some local artists, activists, urbanists and organisers of grassroots initiatives. The general direction of the ‘Laboratory’ is to try to change one district of the city with participatory art tools. Igor Ponosov Russia - igor-ponosov.ru/eng I am a Russian street artist, an activist of the ‘Partizaning’ movement and the author of various publications and projects about urban art. I have been working and living in Moscow since 2003. From 2005 to 2009, I published three books about street art in Russia and the former USSR. From 2011 to 2013, I curated The Wall project (a discussion platform for the street art community) on CCA ‘Winzavod’ in Moscow. In 2011, I founded the ‘Partizaning’ movement with a website for activists, artists and urbanists. Current interests include urban art, urbanism and artivism. 56 People & Ideas 38 COMMONSPACE “Alte Ziegelei” Mainz Design Build is a (new) community of practice that aims to develop sustainable architecture and design solutions that are built in a participatory way, focusing on local resources. Architectural and design students will be building common spaces in collaboration with refugees and other local stakeholders in Mainz. The material that will be mainly used is clay – a traditional ‘poor’ material that could be used around the globe. It is the material of the place, a former brick-manufacturer. By exploring both the spatial habitat and the characteristics of clay as building material, both a real common space as well as a common space of learning are created. Talks and cultural events organised together with diferent cultural partners will draw the focus on the culture of commoning and design as social practice. Collaborations with design build experts across Europe are planned. Laura Popplow Germany I work as a researcher, artist and designer, teaching interaction design and design for social innovation and sustainability at diferent design schools and universities. Key aspects in my work are locative media, participatory design and sustainability. I prefer to work in a transdisciplinary and collective way. From 2010-2014, I have been working on the project FUNGUTOPIA, which is an experiment to work with fungi in design and architecture both as a utopian idea for future scenarios as well as a sustainable building material. Currently my work focuses on my PhD topic “Design Participation in Transformation?”. 57 39 The Kaliningrad region of Russia historically, geographically and culturally belongs to Europe. Its beautiful avenues, tree-lined streets and roads, expressively prove it. These avenues are an important element of the local urban landscape and part of European historic and cultural heritage. With their aesthetic, environmental, safety and infrastructure values, they form a living environment for generations of local residents who want to protect them for future generations. The idea brings citizens together to save the avenues as a public space that belongs to the city, its residents and identity. Kaliningrad avenues have survived diferent geopolitical epochs, but in recent years are in danger of destruction due to poor and harmful regional authorities’ policy and lack of legal protection. They are being literally cut down for unfounded reasons, and need urgent and massive action in order to protect them. The idea is to combine local public mobilisation and international support using contemporary artistic and social media tools with historical and scientiic data to produce stunning and visible mediums channelling people’s will to preserve the avenues to those decision-makers. Galina Raguzina Russia I am a fashion designer and Russian linguist, working for Ecodefense, one of the most prominent Russian environmental NGOs, since 1996. Since 2007, I also work as an environmental journalist writing for independent non-governmental information sources on climate change, energy, responsible consumption, environmental protection and civil rights. Born in Kaliningrad, I came from a family of professional nature admirers. My grandmother, a well-known Kaliningrad dendrologist, taught me to love the rich lora and magniicent landscapes of the Kaliningrad region, a natural and cultural heritage of former Eastern Europe. Recently, political pressure has forced us to establish an organisation in neighbouring Lithuania, in order to continue functioning, so now I live in between Kaliningrad and Vilnius. My related interests are refashion, fair trade and sustainable lifestyles. 58 People & Ideas 40 The Ekenäs Story Caravan In the process of sharing and documenting local stories, we hope to create a sense of community as well as a sense of place-identity. The Caravan project will also attempt to cross boundaries such as age, nationality, language (the city has a large Swedish speaking and a smaller Finnish speaking community and some immigrant groups), gender and the boundaries between city oicials, politicians and community members. In addition to the digital audio and video storytelling project, we plan to collect stories in a paper diary placed in public places. The mobile studio will be set up in community commons – public or semi-public spots such as the library, the harbour, the square, old people’s homes, the train station, the marketplace, an empty lot or a playground. Stories will be told for instance in the form of a classic tale, as a rap, a poem, sketch or a song. Edited audio and video stories will be made into podcasts in cooperation with the radio station and made available on the Caravan website connected to a map. Ylva Rancken-Lutz Finland - yrancken.wordpress.com I am an urban sociologist and activist. For the last six years I have been working on urban and social research projects alongside my non-proit activities. I have also initiated several social and cultural projects over the years. Recently I took the initiative to create an “Ekenäs community forum” – a sort of grassroots democracy project where we try to engage the city’s diferent sectors, artists, NGOs, business, environmental researchers and others interested in city planning. I worked for ten years within the international solidarity organisation Emmaus and together with the local Emmaus group I created a project proposal for a Citymart.com challenge for Malmö 2014. 59 59 People & Ideas 41 Spaces for Arts, Welfare and Progress The project will work to re-explore and create a network of new venues in a marginalised neighbourhood of Alexandria to be used as spaces for free expression, economic development and democratisation through arts and culture. It will do this by changing citizens’ outlook on how to use their resources for start-up social enterprises and empowering women to administrate those marginalised venues in the long term by taking part in the project implementation. The activities will consist of two cultural programmes (four walls and Wanasa) for performing arts and music in addition to creative industries workshops. Mohab Saber Egypt - elmadinaarts.com An actor, director and culture manager, I am also the Executive Director for ElMadina for Performing and Digital Arts since 2007. I was responsible for designing and managing many projects as part of Street Carnival – a series of street theatre performances in public spaces that tackle social issues such as minority rights and sexual harassment against women, and Studio ElMadina, which is an open venue for training and showcasing for artists in Alexandria since 2011. I am also the project manager for Training in Street in three editions between 2011 and 2014. Through this project, various training workshops and performances were organised between artists and street inhabitants in public spaces, as well as implementing awareness campaigns through contemporary arts about sexual harassment against women and discrimination. 60 42 LaFábrika detodalavida LaFábrika detodalavida (LFdTV) is a reclaimed space for public administration by citizens who need a site where they can develop their ideas. LFdTV has managed to become a social and cultural laboratory in an abandoned space. It is based on processes of experimentation that work for the social management of territory and culture in rural areas. Now, we talk about it as a space, process, sentiment and mode of life where there are constantly projects rotating around the common, free and open. A kitchen of knowledge that generates the best dishes and activates change to social realities on a human scale, starting from the bottom with the people. Our awareness of LFdTV is part of a much bigger movement. From a place of partnership, working with multiple enterprises, we are working towards estabilishing a new paradigm. LFdTV is looking for substantial changes in terms of feeling, being and thinking. It wants to deine the human being as a social being – empathetic, cooperative and solicitous. Pedro Salguero Spain - lafabrikadetodalavida.org/ Since 2010 I have been a part of LaFábrika detodalavida. This project was created by the artistic collective Conceptuar-te, which I was also a part of (although this is no longer active). LaFábrika detodalavida has given me the opportunity to grow professionally in a cooperative environment based on open culture and commons. I’m also a member of the future open cooperative LFdTV. In this position I enjoy contributing to the development of social management projects and sharing responsibilities with a professional group of ive lovely people. Currently, thanks to the possibility of teleworking, I’m working from Dublin due to study reasons. 61 People & Ideas 43 LIVING FabLab Its goal is the resident’s fast integration into city life. The LIVING FabLab combines asylum residence with space for exchange and culture to create a growing perception of a positive image of a cultural house instead of a social lashpoint. The concept presents the ofer of exchange between residents and urban residents. We will ind several LIVING FabLabs spread over the city. That means the use of small units such as the temporary use of somewhere that’s vacant or new construction on uncultivated land. The LIVING FabLab gathers diferent spaces of ‘coming together’ with a precise ofer of participation to the direct surrounding in the district. Each LIVING FabLab includes private-individual-space, private-community-space and public-space. The private-space LIVING is adapted to the general demands on refugees’ residences from legal provisions. The public-space FabLab ofers a welcoming and pleasant atmosphere furnished with modular furniture systems, provided as open design or especially designed systems. The FabLab is diferent in every building with its own specialisation (e.g. workshop bike, workshop CNC, language, music, cooking, art, urban gardening...) Antonia Schwarzmeier Germany - antoniaschwarzmeier.de I’m an interior designer with a great interest in social design. Last summer I graduated with a Master’s degree. Now I’m trying to ind my way of breaking through the traditional structures of interior design and going in a more social direction, which is not easy at all, especially to meet people with similar interests. I was doing an exchange year in St. Petersburg. Also I did a year of volunteering in Romania, working in environmental education for children and teenagers. The topic of migration and how the countries of the European Union react to it is a personal concern of mine. The LIVING FabLab is therefore my approach to inding a solution from the perspective of interior design. 62 OpenCityL’Ab 44 The OpenCityL’Ab aims to ‘build the city’ by focusing on the role of public space and by strengthening the community via physical and online participation in this regard. Nowadays we believe that participation is entangled with the culture of open data and for this reason we want communities to become both familiar and conident with it. In fact, beside transparency and public accounting, open local data can help in the management of shared resources – such as public space – as well as in the design of cities and infrastructures. We intend to engage with communities deploying a variety of activities – mapping sessions, events, workshops and DIY – while setting the stage for a platform where diferent local actors can meet and negotiate strategies of open development. In this sense, the mapping of underused or abandoned public spaces aims to raise awareness and adequately communicate the issue also to third parties, representing a irst step in the mise en place of unexpected models of cooperation. Antonio Sforna Italy I have a background in communications and I am dealing with new media and participation. Currently I am studying for a Master’s in Data Journalism in the Netherlands. I am also involved in a grassroots initiative on temporary reuse in my hometown, L’Aquila in Italy. Previously I was in Brussels where I collaborated with architects and designers in the context of social innovation projects. 63 People & Ideas 45 Atlas of Urban Commons Charters An interactive Atlas of Urban Commons Charters will be developed in concert with actors directly involved in the ield, using collaborative and participatory methodologies. Through workshops, camps, and cultural residencies, we will produce a mapping tool (the Atlas) to disseminate knowledge about the process and results of urban commons charters from around the world and to facilitate their replication in other contexts. The online Atlas will contribute to the consolidation of a European network of commoners with international links. Frédéric Sultan France - remixthecommons.org I am a French activist of the commons. I co-facilitate the Francophone Network for the Commons, launched in 2012, and help people create or claim commons in their communities through cultural and educational actions. 64 46 Network the school! It is often the case that the burden of managing the commons is placed entirely on the shoulders of civic-minded individuals, while state institutions shirk their responsibilities. The aim of Network the school! is to garner the signiicant resources at the disposal of traditional educational institutions to support and enable citizens to shape their environment. Educational spaces can, and should, be re-thought as commons – beyond the narrow institutional functions for which they were originally designed (i.e. resources embedded within, and responsive to the needs of, the communities that host them). The aim of the project is to develop a dialogue between representatives of the educational system and local community actors, with a view to jointly identifying existing (but overlooked) assets and opportunities to put them to use in mutually advantageous ways. This is already becoming a reality in some countries (e.g. Germany’s ‘educational landscapes’), where schools are increasingly viewed as important local actors and catalysts of communitymaking. The project aims to introduce these ideas into the Slovak context. Zuzana Tabackova Germany I am an architecture student at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin, Germany. I gained practical experience of designing and leading participatory workshops for formal and informal education spaces while working at the experimental architectural oice of die Baupiloten in Berlin. At the moment I am working as a Research Assistant at the Technical University in Berlin on a project investigating the crossroads and links between education and city development with a view to the impact of ‘learning landscapes’ on their surrounding neighbourhoods. 65 People & Ideas The Ageless City Ana Gonçalves 66 47 Urban WorkBench Changing the delivery mechanism for physical regeneration is vital in fostering the long-term resilience of communities. Based beneath the Churchill Way Flyover in Liverpool, the Urban WorkBench will be a hub for communities looking to do repairs & self-build projects. We’ll run enabling programmes to support community development alongside skills workshops, uniting communities & families fragmented by top-down processes of urban planning & regeneration over the past 20-50 years. Citizens will learn building skills and signiicant ‘lost’ crafts and assist one another in ‘taking control’ in developing their neighbourhoods, using both traditional and emerging techniques. A CNC manufacturing facility enabling open source ‘Wiki-house’ production will ofer a key resource in shifting both procurement and delivery of the built environment into the hands of citizens. This will sit alongside an assembled Wiki-house, itself a destination for learning and cultural events. Steve Threlfall United Kingdom - wemakeplaces.org During the day-to-day, I practice as a designer, leading ‘diferent’ – a small and versatile design studio. We choose to work on and instigate projects that truly do deliver change, placing the stakeholder at the heart of everything we do. I am co-founder of We Make Places CIC, which unites built environment specialists and other talented individuals to help communities kick-start their journey in taking control in the regeneration of their neighbourhoods. We Make Places also issues ‘provocations’ for the city, a call to action to the establishment and citizens to reconsider ignored, underused or condemned places in a new light. In addition, I’m one of the founding Friends of the Flyover, driving a citizen-led campaign project to create a unique urban park and events space in Liverpool (friendsofthelyover.org.uk). 67 People & Ideas 48 Cities are most often built by the public and private sector, creating an ‘ofer’ of housing, public spaces, infrastructure, etc. We believe that another city is not only possible but also in the making! One that is shaped, designed and built by the ‘demand’ and the needs of organised inhabitants’ groups – for the common good. Our project is about catalysing this demand and empowering the inhabitants by building and facilitating a platform connecting – through a Digital Social Platform and physical meetings – inhabitant groups involved in participatory housing and neighbourhood development between each other, as well as to support actors and local governments. Whilst we acknowledge the diversity of models across the various European cultural contexts, we consider that the lack of collaboration between civil society initiatives constitutes a challenge for the wider recognition, visibility and dissemination of their projects and achievements. We think that it is crucial to develop a digital and physical exchange process in order to inspire new initiatives and advocate for a European support framework for ‘community-led projects’. Bea Varnai France - urbamonde.org I’m a recently graduated MA student working for the NGO urbaMonde since 2013. Born in Hungary, raised in Germany and having studied in Spain, France and Switzerland, my life has been equally inluenced by the Eastern and Western European ‘spirit’ and I am thus excited to participate in this truly European Idea exchange and meeting! What brought me to the Idea Camp? I am interested in the production of the city (and particularly the access to housing) led by local communities, some of which I had the chance to engage with in Europe and Latin America on several occasions. I have also lived in a housing cooperative myself over the last year, which triggered my interest in the cooperative movement in a larger sense. 68 49 Yemek Hikaye As rapid, inegalitarian urbanisation processes take over our cities, we need new cultural practices and models of economic behaviour to co-create and revitalise public spaces. Our focus will be on Kuzguncuk Vegetable-Garden (Istanbul) to amplify and monitor the Rejuvenation and Protection project currently in place. We’ll employ new social/cultural practices for two courses of action. One, to help create a self-sustained local economy based on sharing principles – by encouraging sowing/planting in the garden; selling/sharing them at farmer’s market; feeding the revenue back into the garden. Two, to complement the ongoing process of placemaking by encouraging interactions, sharing stories, engaging in public discourse and cultural dialogue. We’ll use the vegetable-garden’s produce to cook food that is particular to diferent regions the neighbourhood people originally come from. We’ll help people to use diferent narrative techniques to tell the story of the food they cook, weaving the common memory so vital for the sustainability of places. These socially-engaged stories will inspire other neighbourhoods in Turkey and Europe to link to each other and use this blueprint to reclaim their public spaces. Gökçe Su Yoğurtçuoğlu Turkey - modeistanbul.org I am a cultural manager based in Istanbul; I am the co-founding Director of MODE Istanbul and Turkish representative of Doc Next Network. I have been leading cultural projects/programmes that facilitate digital media tools to create and share socially engaged stories. I co-design and implement methodologies for expanded education and cross-sectoral collaborations to foster inclusive public discourse and social innovation on local and international scales. As part of the Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons project, I am currently collaborating with social initiatives on developing the Imagine It Into Being programme in Turkey, focusing on revitalising public spaces through creative place-making, participatory actions and communing practices. I hold a BA degree in International Relations (Istanbul) and an MA degree in Media Studies and Film Production (New York). 69 People & Ideas 50 Gaming as a Tool for Urban Decision-Making We propose using gaming as a problem-solving method for city development projects, bringing top-down decision-makers together with bottom-up initiatives from civil society. This means of negotiation has the potential to generate an accessible environment, freed from technical jargon, where various ideas, plans and projects meet, conlict and collaborate towards negotiated outcomes. Games as structured forms of play can fulill a ground of trial and error when adapted to urban processes. They can act as the parallel virtual world of urban processes, where stakeholders ind the safety of testing their own information and strategies against others through means of play. In other words, games can become research and learning environments for cities where knowledge is collected and evolved. We propose piloting this method in Bucharest, by creating both a physical board game played on a scaled model of the city and an online platform that will complement the physical play and work as an open debate space where ideas and player coalitions can be further developed between physical game sessions. Razvan Zamira Romania - poianaluiiocan.org I am an architecture and urban planning graduate with an MA in brownield redevelopment. The main output of my research was the development of a long-term plan that took into account short- and long-term strategies with an emphasis on generating new stakeholder interactions. Currently I’m a student of the 4Cities Master programme in Urban Studies, a unique two-year interdisciplinary and international programme organised in Brussels, Copenhagen, Vienna, Madrid and other surrounding cities. I am the founding member of Poiana lui Iocan Association, a non-proit think tank in Bucharest bridging together architecture practice, research and mediation for community engagement. We created Urboteca, an itinerant pop-up pavilion, showcasing city data and exploring new tools for engaging in urban issues. 70 Bea Varnai 71 Connected Action for the Commons Connected Action for the Commons Through its thematic focus Connecting Culture, Communities and Democracy, ECF initiated Connected Action for the Commons, an actionresearch programme led together with six cultural organisations from across Europe: Culture 2 Commons (Croatia); Les Têtes de l’Art (France); Krytyka Polityczna (Poland); Oberliht (Moldova); Platoniq (Spain); and Subtopia (Sweden). Connected Action for the Commons seeks to connect a myriad of cultural change-makers, and to help a European-wide community to emerge that uses the power of culture and creativity to breathe new life into democracy. We deine ‘commoning’ as new forms of cooperation by citizens and communities who are developing alternative and participatory democratic practices. This speciic act of ‘commoning’ as a collective venture of codevelopment and co-government of everything we hold in common is dramatically changing the way we look at our societies. Our aim is to scale up our co-local ‘commoning’ activities, to combine our inluence, highlight and connect new practices with European policy-makers and gain knowledge to support democratic societal change. We have adopted a networked approach to collaborative working, sharing expertise and building a community of practice involving and engaging local communities of our network into our work. 72 Culture 2 Commons Croatia CULTURE 2 COMMONS Miljenka Buljević { Alliance Operation City - operacijagrad.net Clubture Network - clubture.org Right to the City - pravonagrad.org Katarina Pavić Teodor Celakoski Culture 2 Commons comprises three organisations based in Croatia: Clubture Network, Alliance Operation City and Right to the City. The leading principle of Culture 2 Commons is the development of intensive collaborative platforms, i.e. tactical networks, a new form of emerging socio-cultural practice with two main purposes: • • expanding the deinition of cultural action developing new collaborative practices and models. We deal with issues such as: public domain, social transition, hybrid institutional models of public-civil partnerships and change in the cultural system. We use methods such as: civic action, advocacy, transfer of technological practices into the cultural domain, partnership and networking. Our aim is to realise the potential of culture to reassume its proactive, dynamic and critical function in society. We believe that this can be done only by creating models of civic participation that make it possible for citizens to reclaim the power to organise and implement changes at an institutional level. Therefore, we build institutions jointly governed by organised citizens and local authorities, we create models of governance that provide partnerships between civil actors and decision-makers and we are creating sustainable solutions as structural responses to critical issues in the cultural and social sphere at local, national and international levels. We give visibility to public issues that are seemingly not directly linked to culture by contesting, debating and suggesting viable solutions using methods such 73 Connected Action for the Commons as: public protest, collecting signatures for referendum, participation in public consultations and media actions. In the last ten years we have created high visibility on issues of public infrastructure and its governance, both at local levels and nationally. We have contested privatisation of the commons and public services (e.g. monetisation of highways), manipulation of public interest through real estate development (golf used as an excuse for densiication) and use of cultural heritage for the purpose of marketisation and private interests (cinema and pedestrian zone turned into shopping mall and private car park). We use this high visibility to create leverage for negotiating with local and national authorities to introduce new models of institutions and governance. In various cities in Croatia (Rijeka, Pula, Zagreb, Split, Karlovac, Dubrovnik) we have coestablished cultural institutions and at the national level we have successfully advocated for the establishment of the foundation for independent culture. We have been active internationally on various topics, but especially in the South East European region where we co-create possibilities for collaboration and partnership between independent cultural organisations. Krytyka Polityczna Poland Agnieszka Wiśniewska Igor Stokiszewski Joanna Tokarz-Haertig Krytyka Polityczna has been operating since 2002. We are active in three main ields: education, culture and politics. We believe these three are connected by the inluence and impact they have on how society is shaped. Our aim is to ight exclusion; increase civic participation and social awareness in public life; ind diagnoses and solutions to the current breakdown in social bonds and social 74 imagination. We work through a network of local activist groups, cultural centres (Warsaw, Cieszyn, Gdansk), a publishing house, an online Daily Opinion and the Institute for Advanced Study conducting academic research and seminar activity. Krytyka Polityczna (KP) aims to create open and diverse public debate. We want to open the channels for topics, groups and points of view that are excluded from the main discourse, as well as empowering those who cannot represent their needs and perspectives. We strive to help remove the barriers between science, arts and politics. We try to persuade artists to think in political terms and public igures, politicians and local authorities to treat culture as a legitimate tool for social change. We involve social activists, animators, journalists and politicians in our work, as well as encouraging writers, intellectuals and artists to discuss current political and cultural issues in our daily lives. The debate on culture is a part of a wider debate on the concept of commons. Culture is like public transport: everyone should be entitled to it, with no car owners privileged over the users of buses and trams. The ever more audible discussions on the city and public space in Poland, on commons in Europe, have set in motion a reconiguration of the ways in which we think. We have started to ask ourselves questions like: “Who is the city really for: only for those who can aford it or for all its inhabitants? Is it parks and public spaces for everybody that we need more of, or is it parking lots? Are we going to let the business of privatising entire swathes of our cities, only to be turned into shopping malls, go unpunished? Have streets and plazas with nothing but banks all over them anything to do with spaces for human beings?” Go wherever you like in Europe, and talk to activists and art workers, there’ll always be someone talking about commons, goods understood as common resources, accessible property: both physical goods, as public space, and virtual ones. Artists initiate social debates with their works, activists resort to tools traditionally associated with artists. Culture is not there to pay, to bring proit, not in the sense in which making business has to bring proit. Culture counts in a diferent way. It is culture’s role in creating a community, in narrating the world, in establishing relationships that matters. The main idea of the KP network is to stay close to the problems of communities. Activities include initiatives around public policies and spatial solutions in the cities, long-term strategies and development goals, dealing with narratives about local identities, history, economic transformation, as well as cultural animation or creative artistic work. At the same time, we try to transfer and describe locally important and speciic issues in a broader perspective and develop common goals. 75 Connected Action for the Commons Most of us encounter a crisis of social imagination. Opportunities like the Idea Camp let people freely present and question diferent solutions, combine various experiences and knowledge, risk and fail or succeed for the joy of trying to make a change and, most importantly, bring together people who care. http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/ http://politicalcritique.org/ Oberliht Young Artists Association Moldova Vitalie Sprinceana Vladimir Us Oberliht Young Artists Association (Chișinău) was established in 2000 and since then it has supported young artists, contemporary art and civil society development in general, with an emphasis on the independent culture scene. We observe various processes that shape our urban environment by analysing the public space transformations. We also try to participate in these processes through community building and activism. We believe (and act!) along the following principles: that all citizens (as inhabitants, as artists, as activists) should be given a voice and initiative in solving the problems of their cities; that civic activism has a huge role to play in advancing democracy and inclusiveness in the city; that art can help Chișinău inhabitants to understand their city, its past and present, and imagine the future and themselves as part of it. In our activities we develop, involve and engage various communities. 76 “Zaikin Park – the people’s park” is an ambitious project aiming to revive an abandoned park in the very heart of the historical part of Chișinău. The project includes a rehabilitation of the park itself – building pedestrian alleys, installing benches, illumination, a free source of water in the middle of the park, a playground for children, sport facilities for young people and a community centre for the neighbourhood. At the same time, the project intends to build a community around the park, to involve the inhabitants in this process by giving them voice and power to decide what kind of facilities should be installed there. For this purpose we have organised various workshops, cultural activities, public discussions and other events about the development of the park. In fact, community building is for us, in this project but also in all our activities, equally as important as designing new types of infrastructure and introducing new uses for various public spaces in the city. In a similar way we have started a project that reclaims a public square in the middle of the city that is overcrowded with parked cars, and develops a new vision for the square as a pedestrian space and an open air cultural centre, called B68 – free zone/art space. In the process of consolidating and organising the activist and artistic communities in Chișinău that took the form of the Civic Urban Network, we stick to the principle of building with the community, rather than for the community. Our idea is to set up a viable network of artists and civic activists that will in the future accomplish two main goals: on the one hand, making these communities stronger and able to amplify their voices, and on the other hand encouraging them to self-organise and develop better connections among themselves, making them more sustainable and encouraging the creation of inter-sectorial and interideological alliances at the city level. http://www.oberliht.com/ 77 Connected Action for the Commons Platoniq Spain Carmen Lozano Bright Enric Senabre Hidalgo María G. Perulero The urban spaces we live in – from small towns to larger cities – have been sufering from the tremendous impact of transformation in the last decades. Growth and degrowth of industries, followed by the supremacy of an economy based on services… and now, a period of transition in which sharing and caring for each other has become fundamental. Nowadays, we citizens of Europe feel a strong concern about our public spaces, along with a strong tendency to transform our collective imaginary of public space into more livable, enjoyable and social places, dedicated not only to consuming but where political and democratic practices can take place. Platoniq’s most important project to date is the open source crowdfunding and crowdsourcing platform, Goteo.org. Goteo is the only platform for crowdfunding campaigns that adds an unconditional value to the returns produced by the supporting crowd together with the project promoters: the impact must be open, replicable, traceable and socially relevant. In this sense, Goteo has created a network supported by a community of 65,000 users, including promoters, backers and related partners, weaving together projects with a strong engagement in civic impact. From journalists and audiovisual producers to architects and urban planners, from lawyers to caring citizens, together they all help to create and share open data for good, and to foster initiatives that shape our cities through active communities. Some successfully co-funded campaigns that are now part of Goteo’s heritage explain how collaboration can foster circular economy practices that raise awareness with each other, like a snowball efect. ‘Quién cobra la obra’ (Who pays for this work?) is an in-depth analysis of the public construction companies winning bids in Spain. They used digital 78 technology applied to investigative journalism, with research articles, visualisations and an open database available for downloading and reuse. As in every Civio project (they’ve had four campaigns in Goteo), all content, data and code is open and free. Arquitecturas Colectivas (Collective Architectures) is a network of individuals and collectives sharing an interest in the participatory construction of the urban environment. They were co-inanced by 145 backers in 2013 in order to expand and improve the tools that give support to that network. This year, they’re celebrating their eighth international meeting in a rural area of Southern Extremadura. In Spain, it has become common to hear and talk about evictions. Between 2007 and 2014 some 170 evictions were performed every day. Tens of thousands of families have lost their homes. The ilm ‘Cerca de tu casa’ (Close to your home) collected €124,253 to produce a ictionalised account not only of this dramatic situation, but also of the collaboration emerging around it. The raw recordings of the ilm will be released under copyleft license. Communication, construction, citizen auditing and replicability are elements that can be tackled, but not only by bottom-up initiatives. In Goteo, we believe in transversal engagement, and so we work to foster match funding and collaboration between institutions, citizens, entrepreneurs and civic initiatives for our cities. http://www.youcoop.org/ http://www.goteo.org/ 79 Connected Action for the Commons Subtopia Sweden Anders Lindgren Karin Lekberg Ludvig Duregård When we look at the development or “progress” of the urban environment, we always ind ourselves wanting. There’s a human dimension that’s lacking most of the time. As a cultural organisation hell bent on injecting art and culture in as many ields as possible, the city becomes a place of challenges and opportunities. Because the city has people but doesn’t obviously facilitate relationships, it has power structures but seems to lack mechanisms for participation and it has artists without workshops and an audience (and potential audience) forced to step behind fancy doors in order to enjoy new ideas, rather than just walk to the city square. Subtopia has been deep in urban culture and development issues for many years, ranging from outside consultations on local growth to building graiti walls. Actually, Subtopia in itself is a sort of urban experiment where the founding idea could be “Idea Camped” into: What if we as a municipality could cluster and attract artists and educators, in order to provide cultural, inancial and personal growth for passionate individuals in our suburbs. Our work here in Alby has always been about creativity and community at its core. Among the Subtopia tenants there are social companies focusing on food as means of integration as well as a throng of circus companies. There are ballet courses for 5 year olds as well as professional development workshops in the latest ilm stunt gear. All this to create a place that attracts and fosters talent that will later have a positive impact on one or millions of individuals. The city has a lot of opportunities. The density of people gives a high density of ideas that can hook up and feed into each other. These ideas and human interactions frame the future. That’s why we need to do this now. With the development of shops and commercial actors moving out of the city centres (thanks for that!), there’s an opportunity to ill that void. We would argue that the most human of all things is culture and relationships so why shouldn’t that be at the core of our cities? 80 http://www.subtopia.se/ Les Têtes de l’Art France Sam Khebizi Ina Studenroth This year’s Idea Camp topic is very much linked to Les Têtes de l’Art’s daily practice and approach. We mainly work in the central districts of Marseille, marked by high unemployment rates, deicient infrastructure, cultural tensions between communities and few spaces for social interaction. Gentriication has become more and more of an issue in the last few years, relocating populations to decentralised districts and tending to make the city centre attractive for tourists and populations with higher incomes. Since 2010, we have been organising ‘Place à l’art’ [“Art square” or “give art space”], an annual event that takes place on a public square in the city centre. The artistic participatory process we initiated in this district is intimately linked to its social and territorial context. Place à l’art aims to rethink modes of artistic intervention in public space. It places the artist at the heart of the city and the public debate. Throughout the year we propose three types of actions: “site speciic” art works by artists, taking into account the speciicity of the space, participatory workshops run by professionals and mediation activities involving the population. In our experience, the combination of these activities and being on site, close to the communities and their concerns, adds to the building of a stronger feeling of local identity by improving relations between people and communities. We join forces with other organisations coming from diferent sectors, based in the same areas. We also run a citizen media, “La telepart du 3ème” inviting inhabitants of all generations to produce ilms showing their neighbourhood and valuing citizen initiatives. These ilms, which would hardly have their place in commercial media channels, create social relations and make people change their views on their neighbourhood. Another recent initiative, “Territoire collectif”, shows how the re-thinking of networks, cross-sectoral and open collaboration can be fostered by the use of 81 Connected Action for the Commons digital media. For a few years, we have been observing an increase of citizen actions aiming to regain the public space, both physically and politically. Several operators from Marseille interested in participatory projects have joined in a collaborative group in order to develop a digital map, showing participatory projects in the Marseille area in the irst stage and later on, in a wider area. “Territoire collectif” aims to list existing participatory events and initiatives to make citizens able to identify those and to participate. Furthermore, the map should become a tool for organisers to identify existing local resources and create synergies between events and actors. Through our experience and through our network of artists, experts and various partners, we wish to support the Idea Makers in the development of their ideas and hopefully their imminent implementation. Our wish is to build together a wide European network of actors and initiatives that create more awareness for the value of the commons and the need for sustainable societies. http://www.lestetesdelart.fr/ 82 OPEN AND CONNECT Elvira Gizatullina 83 Speakers & Facilitators Speakers & Facilitators PlataForma: Power to the Makers Miguel Magalhães 84 Julio Albarrán Pérez ZEMOS98 - Spain Photographer I am an independent photography and video professional from Seville specialising in visual chronicles of events and photojournalism. I studied photography at the University of the Arts, London before moving back to Spain to live in Madrid. I am currently working on a multimedia storytelling project, producing short documentaries, and developing new ways of documenting and communicating through audiovisual media. Between 2009 and 2015, I was the oicial photographer for the ZEMOS98 International Festival that took place in Seville. “Do we consider underground communities, which apply and live by the principles and ethics of the commons, as part of this laboratory of collaborative processes and ideas? How do we make these scattered communities possible and long-lasting? How do we account for the decentralised and random cultural activities developed by those horizontal communities when they only exist within the people who sustain them? How do we manage to document those activities and processes and make them part of the history of a city? How do they become part of History?” Michel Bauwens P2P Foundation - Thailand Ideatalk I am the founding Director of the P2P Foundation and work in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance and property. I am also Research Director of CommonsTransition.org, a platform for policy development that aims towards a society of the commons that would enable a more egalitarian, just and environmentally stable world. I am a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics. My recent book Save the world – Towards a Post Capitalist Society with P2P is based on a series of interviews with Jean Lievens. I also co-authored with Vasilis Kostakis Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy published by Palgrave Pivot in 2014. 85 Speakers & Facilitators “The current Greek crisis has shown the very clear limitations in national sovereignty and democratic decision-making in the current conjuncture. While ‘Plan A’ is a recipe for social regression, and Plan B (the socalled Grexit) still an uncertain adventure, what becomes clear is the overarching need for a Plan C, i.e. active practices and proposals towards augmenting the role of the commons in our life, that of our nations, but most importantly that of our direct urban communities. It is at the urban level that the highest potential for real change lies, since cities have to survive, in all circumstances, even as the larger contexts may decline. This is what we are called to do, not just to work locally for ourselves, but to share and coordinate our experiences to all the urban commoners in the world, and the Idea Camp will be one of the key places and moments to do this. Now is the time for Plan C!” Miljenka Buljević Culture 2 Commons - Croatia Connected Action for the Commons I am a cultural operator and translator who focuses on the promotion of literature and reading habits as well as on non-proit cultural management and networking. I am co-founder of Kulturtreger and the Manager of its literary club Booksa in Zagreb. Since 2010, I have been the Chairwoman of Alliance Operation City, a platform of local organisations that are active in the ield of independent culture and youth in Zagreb. In 2009, the Alliance and the City of Zagreb co-founded POGON – Zagreb Center for Independent Culture and Youth, a cultural institution based on civic-public partnership that provides basic services and manages infrastructure for programmes of civil society organisations. I am a member of the Editorial Board of the European network of cultural journals, Eurozine. “The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.” – Lewis Mumford, The City in History 86 Teodor Celakoski Culture 2 Commons - Croatia Connected Action for the Commons Teodor Celakoski is a cultural worker and activist from Zagreb. His work ranges from coordinating cultural programmes, networking and cultural advocacy, to institutional innovation and political activism. Teodor is co-founder of Multimedia Institute MaMa, Zagreb. In the last ten years he initiated several projects and platforms focused on advocating change in the Croatian culture policy. Recently he is engaged with the Right to the City campaigns ighting against devastation of public spaces and common goods in Zagreb and Croatia. In 2014 he received the ECF Princess Margret Award for Culture. “In order to build the city you have to own it. There are two ways to give the answers to the question: Who owns the city? These are two complementary and interdependent means of our political and social reproduction. One is struggle against the privatization and overexploitation of our public and common goods and the other is innovation of the institutions to govern them in a more democratic and sustainable manner.” Vassilis Chryssos sarantaporo.gr - community wireless network - Greece Commonspoly As an engineer I tend to be practical. As a commoner and activist, I look for ways to use my creativity, knowledge and experience in pursuit of the vision of a commonsbased (P2P) society. Being practical in ‘commonising’ our society simply means doing things in a more efective and eicient way: together with other members of the community, measuring success in terms of social added value. This is the core concept of the Commonspoly game that we created and are going to facilitate during Idea Camp 2015. “A group of 3-5 determined, inspired and bold people can change the way knowledge is produced, shared and enriched worldwide, as Wikipedia has proven. Idea Camp is a place where determined, inspired and bold people come together to exchange and share ideas, to change the world. It actually can work!” 87 Speakers & Facilitators Óscar Luis Clemente Galán ZEMOS98 - Spain Media Lab I have been writing and directing documentaries since the late 1990s. Interested in social and environmental issues, I have made ethnographic ilms, documentary essays and creative documentaries on subjects like the impact of tourism in traditional ishing communities, the car as a symbol of mass consumer society or the act of representation. I also enjoy teaching documentary making. “We, the PIGS, have moved from having poor houses and rich public spaces to have both poor houses and also poor public spaces. I’m interested in how can we reverse this quick and muddy process in which the Car has a lot of importance.” – Óscar Luis Clemente Galán, The Gentleman of Farewell Sofía Coca Gamito ZEMOS98 - Spain Media Lab I have been part of ZEMOS98 since 2005. In the past two years, I have been leading a co-research project about feminism and commons, called COPYLOVE. I am one of the coordinators of the ZEMOS98 Festival and was the coordinator of Radioactivos, a radiopodcast between 2006 and 2011 about digital culture. In the last months, I have been coordinating Municipal Recipes, a slow-cooked campaign about the municipalist process in Spain. I have a BA in Journalism from the University of Seville. 88 “Hello, I’ve known you since you were born; I’ve always have been around, do you remember me? We are in danger. Democracy has been corrupted and discredited. It is an empty word and we need to experience it again. Who am I? I am your city. I like it when you defend me and you occupy my squares. When you ask for what you think is yours. We need each other, did you know that? Yes, you know it, but sometimes you forget it. Thank you, I see you in action again to defend me. I can feel you are imagining how it could be to live with dignity again. I am here to tell you that, if you take care of me, I will take care of you. That’s the deal. You take back the democracy and I will give you rights and joy.” – From the documentary ilm, Municipal Recipes Ludvig Duregård Subtopia - Sweden Connected Action for the Commons I work as a Project Coordinator for Subtopia within ECF’s Connected Action for the Commons programme. I started out in the advertising world (which I hated) and soon checked out and ran away with the circus, literally, working as a tour manager for Swedish contemporary circus company Cirkus Cirkör. The last few years I have been working as a Communication Director for Subtopia. When I’m not working with Subtopia, I am pre-occupied with other frameworking and content producing organisations spanning small theatre companies in the rural south of Sweden to European networks. I provide strategic support and organise events for, among others, Halmstad International Street Theatre Festival (Halmstad, SE), Trans Europe Halles (Lund, SE). I represent performing arts on the regional Creative Board of Skåne and spend most of my time in the (objectively) most beautiful place on earth (Swedish south coast). “It’s strange to keep so much of art behind institutional walls. Ticket sales rarely (read never) cover the cost of indoors presentation: rents, hosts, ticket oice, security etc. And this other venue, the one in the public space is in great need of cultural action. Walking down any street I see ten shoe stores for every artistic idea in the public space. I’m not saying that we should tear down every national theatre (or shoe store) in the world. But how magniicent would it be if artists were allowed to make spectacular art accessible to everyone regardless of cultural, social and inancial background?” 89 Speakers & Facilitators Kevin Flanagan P2P Foundation - Ireland Ideatalk /Media Resource Center I am an Irish artist and activist. I am an advocate for the Commons and Peer to Peer as paradigms for social change and transition to a post-capitalist society. As Community Coordinator of the P2P Foundation, I work closely with researchers and activists from around the world. I have collaborated on a number of projects including P2Pvalue, FLOKsociety and Commons Transition. My art practice includes drawing, photography, video and performance works. I have exhibited in Ireland and internationally. My work explores social and ecological themes. I hold a Master’s in Fine Art from the University of Ulster, Belfast. “The Commons represents an emergent political imaginary, a new horizon of emancipatory political potential. Commoners directly challenge conventional political and economic thought limited to market and state-based solutions. Discourse on the Commons ofers a means for bringing together a movement of movements, working together for social justice, social economy, the environment and the stewardship of our rich cultural commons. Celebrating diversity and diference as well as all that share, commoning deepens democratic and participatory practices.” Juan Freire Teamlabs - Spain Adviser to Connected Action for the Commons I enjoy imagining futures and organising teams to make those futures happen. I develop strategy and leadership for open organisations oriented towards continuous innovation. My passion for the ocean made me become a marine biologist and develop science for citizens in several projects related to environmental conservation and management. In 2011 I left the university to become Chief Innovation Oicer of the consultancy Barrabés group and cofounder of Barrabés Next. I co-founded in 2012 90 TEAMLABS/ – a company focused on learning labs and experiences; in 2013, mmodulUS – an open source design brand; and in 2015, the scientiic-creative agency inViable. “The commons are dirty, hybrid. Human organisations are governed by a combination of external rules (state and market) and those that are autoimposed... But actually the new conditions generated by the interaction of the three forces are more relevant than the relative importance of each one alone. This fact promotes continuous instability and in this way opens possibilities for innovation and change. Commons don’t need to be dominant to change the society. Commons only need to interact in an intelligent way with state and markets to change them; or in other words to change the rules afecting the life of people.” – Juan Freire, What is (and what is not) the commons?: the ghost of communitarism Felipe González Gil ZEMOS98 - Spain Media Lab I have been part of ZEMOS98 since 2000, coordinating international and audiovisual projects. I also write in Interferencias about free and digital culture of the digital Spanish newspaper eldiario.es. I am also a video-activist with more than 50 remixes and video-mashups about the political context in Spain. I have a BA in Audiovisual Communication from the Universidad de Sevilla, and am a Post-graduate in E-Learning from The National Distance Education University (UNED), Certiicate of Pedagogic Aptitude by the ICE at the University of Seville “If the city was a free and open software, how would that city be?” 91 Speakers & Facilitators Dougald Hine Sweden Overall facilitation I am a social thinker, writer and former BBC journalist. As the founder of the utopian regeneration agency Spacemakers, I kickstarted a series of grassroots projects to reimagine and reanimate city neighbourhoods. Through my texts and talks, I have developed an approach to the urban commons that is grounded in the logic of friendship. I grew up in the north-east of England, worked in Sheield and London, before moving to Sweden in 2012. I am currently leader of artistic and audience development for Riksteatern, Sweden’s national theatre. http://dougald.nu “A new kind of spatial agent is emerging: improvisational, bottomup, working with the materials to hand; perhaps unqualifed, or using their training in unexpected ways; responding pragmatically to the constrictions and precarities of post-crisis living. Between the jugaad culture of the Indian village, the temporary structures built by jobless architects, the pop-up shops, the infrastructure-savvy squatters and open source shelter-makers, the Treehouse Galleries and urban barns and Temporary Schools of Thought, just maybe something new is being born. We could call it the culture of the Space Hacker.” Dougald Hine, The Future We Deserve Dr. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe Duke University - USA Ideatalk I am a London-born urban anthropologist with Nigerian-Irish/ English-Guyanese roots. As a former Reader in Anthropology, I taught for ten years at the University of East London (UK). Currently, I am a Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University (USA). I received a Joint PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley/ San Francisco. My research and teaching interests include global expressive cultures (visual, musical and literary) as forms of resistance as well as the ways in which they are informed by migration, settlement, displacement, exile, longing and belonging. 92 “Movements of diverse groups of people and the circulation of capital to, from and within cities inevitably lead to multiple and at times competing claims for space, place and community while at the same time creating possibilities for the formation of unifying neighborhood narratives.” – Dr. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, (An)Other Diasporic City: Belonging and the Transnational Processes of Making Home, public lecture delivered at Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam, 12 March 2015 Sam Khebizi Les Têtes de l’Art - France Connected Action for the Commons I am founding Director of Les Têtes de l’Art. Originally trained as an actor, I have been working for ten years as an actor, dramaturge and trainer while simultaneously overseeing the emergence and development of the organisation. I have taken part in a number of training programmes in cultural management and my thesis, focused on supporting participatory artistic practices, draws on my experience at Les Têtes de l’Art. This experience is also a key element in my work assisting the creation of new projects, identifying their needs, and connecting with resource persons (artists, associations, institutions, etc.). Since 2005, I have been involved full-time in the development of Les Têtes de l’Art and have also played a role in several networks related to the social economy and solidarity (ESS). I am also administrator at ESS Regional Chamber and at SCIC SMartfr, a cooperative of 6,000 members in France, dedicated to cultural project management. ‘Instead of giving a politician the keys of the city, it might be better to change the locks.’ - Doug Larson, 1926 Rene Kubasek Czech Republic Advisor to Connected Action for the Commons Between 2010 and 2015 I was Director of the Czech Cultural Centre in Bucharest, Romania. Between 2005-2008, I was the Czech representative in the International Visegrad Fund, 93 Speakers & Facilitators an international organisation that supports civil society in the Visegrad Group countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). I have collaborated with a number of NGOs, and between 1998 and 2004 I organised the Forum 2000 conferences, initiated and led by Václav Havel. As a documentary photographer, I have presented my work at exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad. “All the time our cities are being permitted without control to destroy the surrounding landscape with its nature, traditional pathways, avenues of trees, villages, mills and meandering streams, and build in their place some sort of gigantic agglomeration that renders life nondescript, disrupts the network of natural human communities, and under the banner of international uniformity it attacks all individuality, identity or heterogeneity. And on the occasions it tries to imitate something local or original, it looks altogether suspect, because it is obviously a purpose-built fake. There is emerging a new type of a previously described existential phenomenon: unbounded consumer collectivity engenders a new type of solitude.” – 14th Annual Forum 2000 Conference in Prague, 13 October 2010 Anders Lindgren Subtopia - Sweden Ideas on Wheels A 49-year-old husband and father of two, I live in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. I work at Subtopia as head of KLUMP, a growth place for cultural and socially aware initiatives and businesses. I am an expert in helping people to realise that they have what it takes. I have a Master’s in Fine Art from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts at Umeå University. “The old city center is a monocultural desert. The new city is being built from the outside in.” 94 Carmen Lozano Bright Platoniq - Spain Commonspoly Of Spanish and British background but born in Colombia, I have been living in Madrid since 2012, where I have experienced and researched the rising transformation of citizen laboratories and P2P practices. I recently joined the team of Goteo/ Platoniq, a platform that incentivises the growth of the commons through crowdfunding. During 2015, I am one of the 25 R&D grantees supported by ECF and work on developing a project on peer-to-peer initiatives that are transforming public space through Southern Europe: P2P Plazas: a Southern European Network. “They want us in seclusion; they’ll ind us in common.” – Patio Maravillas (citizen-managed social centre in Madrid). Sign-of from a 2014 statement publicly communicating the impending eviction of their building Canan Marasligil The Netherlands Media Lab I am a freelance writer, literary translator, editor and curator based in Amsterdam. I work internationally on a variety of literary and cultural projects. My primary interest is in challenging oicial narratives and advocating freedom of expression through diferent creative processes, using various media, online and oline. I have worked with cultural organisations and have participated in residencies: as translator-inresidence at the Free Word Centre in London (2013); as a cultural journalist at WAAW in Senegal (2015); and most recently at Copenhagen University to work on my project City in Translation, looking at stories behind the multilingual expressions throughout cities. I work closely with ECF on curating their online presence, including website, eZine and social media, as well as with MitOSt in Berlin on the Tandem Cultural Exchange programme and as literature curator with Europalia International Arts Festival in Brussels. More on: cananmarasligil.net 95 Speakers & Facilitators “Translation is at the centre of everything I do, including how I approach cities. I take languages and the city’s public space as a starting point to explore how the process of translation takes place and how people interact with the languages in their city. This vibrant and interactive multilingualism throughout urban landscapes is a central feature in how we imagine the future of our cities and part of how we want to build communities.” Katarina Pavić Culture 2 Commons - Croatia Connected Action for the Commons I am a cultural operator and activist. I have been engaged in the activities of the independent cultural scene in Croatia and South East Europe (SEE) since 2005. I am a coordinator of the Clubture Network, a collaborative platform bringing together independent cultural organisations in Croatia. I also help developing the activities of Kooperativa, a regional platform that brings together independent cultural organisations from SEE. My professional interests involve advocacy and civic action, policy analysis and development in the ield of culture and civil society. Previously I was a youth activist and representative, volunteering as a President and Board Member of the Croatian Youth Network, an umbrella youth organisation in Croatia. I am also one of the activists of the Right to the City, a local Zagreb platform that ights economic overexploitation of urban space and unsustainable urban development policies. “We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.” – Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities María G. Perulero Platoniq - Spain Ideas on Wheels / Crowdfunding workshop 96 I am a member of the crowdfunding and crowdsourcing open source platform Goteo.org. I advise and support open crowdfunding campaigns, the coordination of matchfunding calls, product development and training workshops. I also represent and promote the platform nationally and internationally and now, more and more, coordinate projects and actions for the internalisation of the platform. Apart from Goteo, I have participated in the development of projects related to information technology and digital culture and I am quite interested in emerging models and economic sustainability practices around commonsoriented projects. This is a topic I began to explore in January 2013 through the workstation Commons Economies in Medialab-Prado, addressing topics like cryptomoney, cooperativism, collaborative economy, crowdfunding, etc. I have a degree in Advertising and Public Relations from the University of Málaga, Spain. “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. [...] The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” – David Harvey, The Right to the City Enric Senabre Hidalgo Platoniq - Spain Crowdfunding workshop I am a member of the Platoniq collective, co-founder and service designer at Goteo.org – the open source network for civic crowdfunding and distributed collaboration for encouraging the independent development of creative and innovative initiatives that contribute to the common good, free knowledge and open code. I am also Vice President of the Observatory for CyberSociety and teach software studies at the Open University of Catalonia, where I hold a Master’s Degree in Information and Knowledge Society. I am a Certiied Scrum Master by the Scrum Alliance, and co-founding member of the Spanish chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. “The idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.” – Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time 97 Speakers & Facilitators Vitalie Sprinceana Oberliht - Moldova Connected Action for the Commons I am a sociologist, blogger, journalist and urban activist based in Chișinău, Moldova. I am also a co-editor at PLATZFORMA.MD, a web platform for social, economic and political criticism. I am interested in and I argue for inclusive democratic public spaces, social justice, free knowledge, plurality of worldviews and practices. With Oberliht Young Artists Association, we are working in the Chișinău area, trying to use art as a tool for community change and building communities through artistic expression. “Building a city is not the specialist’s job, it’s everyone’s job. I believe that the city should be built not for the people but with the people. Only then we will have the city that we need.” Ina Studenroth Les Têtes de l’Art - France Connected Action for the Commons I am an International Project Manager at Les Têtes de l’Art, with degrees in cultural management and sociology. In the past I have worked with artists from various disciplines, as well as with organisations such as Marseille-Provence (MP) 2013, European Capital of Culture and the Avignon Festival on production issues and project development. A native of Germany, I have lived in Marseille since 2006 and have extensive experience in managing projects funded by the European Commission. As Assistant to the Director in charge of programming at MP 2013, I notably developed several cross-sectoral projects of international scope. Today, I contribute my knowledge of international collaboration to project initiatives through Les Têtes de l’Art’s advisory work and via training programmes (Goethe Institut in Tunis). I describe myself as “a creator of connections”, facilitating creative exchange between individuals and organisations from various cultural backgrounds and locations. Lucas Tello Pérez ZEMOS98 - Spain Media Lab 98 I am a media-maker from Seville and a co-worker at ZEMOS98. I have been involved as a tutor and media-maker in the Doc Next Network programme Remapping Europe – A Remix Project highlighting the Migrants Perspective and 98lab, the media lab produced by ZEMOS98. I have worked as Online Editor for Doc Next Network. In the few last months, I have been working on a webdoc about collaborative economy. “For a sustainable city on a long-term basis, we have to recognise we are not self-suicient, we need to care for the vulnerability of the bodies and the interdependencies between diferent spaces of the planet.” – Sharing Economy. A webdoc about desert islands and Financial wrecks Charlie Tims United Kingdom Media Resource Centre I am interested in creativity, cultural policy and public spaces and live in London. I am currently working as a researcher with the Doc Next Network and as an associate of the think tank Demos. “We are the Village Green Preservation Society. God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety. We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society. God save strawberry jam and all the diferent varieties.” Ray Davies, The Village Green Preservation Society (song) Joanna Tokarz-Haertig Krytyka Polityczna - Poland Connected Action for the Commons I am a sociologist, graduate of the University of Warsaw; I studied in Belgium (Univerisité Catholique de Louvain-LaNeuve) and Italy (Universita degli Studi in Urbino); between 2005-2009, I was project coordinator in the area of social and labour polices related to ageing and demographic shifts at the Academy for the Development of Philanthropy in Poland. Since August 2009, I have been fundraising and project coordinator at Stanislaw Brzozowski Association/Krytyka Polityczna. I am involved in initiatives that support social activism, campaigns for sustainable development, equal rights and that are against discrimination. Since 2014, I am member of the Connected Action for the Commons international networked team within the ECF Networked Programme. “I believe that city dwellers, at least most of them, want to live in more human and environmentally friendly cities, to connect not co-exist. Sadly, it often gets done from the wrong end by building gated communities, 99 Speakers & Facilitators alternative communication and work spaces for those who can be part of it. It is so great to follow and take part in a growing number of local initiatives, cultural – social centers, cooperatives, neighborhood communities that are experimenting on new models and challenging our habits. However, when possible there is also a need for a major shift in paradigm and basic ways of thinking that today are a driving force of city policies, social and economic development. International investments, migration, pollution, just to mention a few of the biggest phenomena can’t be challenged by a district initiative. Urban movements that are taking on a political agenda (which doesn’t always mean that they are becoming a political party) are often gaining a legitimisation for change and are challenging ‘the bigger picture’. If I were to say, we should support both perspectives to ind the right end to start.” Vladimir Us Oberliht - Moldova Connected Action for the Commons I am an artist and curator based in Chișinău, Moldova and a founding member of Oberliht Young Artists Association. I studied art, curating, cultural management and cultural policy in Chișinău, Grenoble and Belgrade. Through my recent works and projects, I examine the processes of transformation of the public space in post-Soviet cities along with the need for conceptualising an alternative network of public spaces for Chișinău. “Urbanization is about the perpetual production of an urban commons (or its shadow-form of public spaces and public goods) and its perpetual appropriation and destruction by private interests.” David Harvey, Rebel Cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution, 2012 Agnieszka Wiśniewska Krytyka Polityczna - Poland Connected Action for the Commons A civic activist, feminist, obtained my MA in Social Science and Polish Studies. I am an Editor of many books on Polish cinema and documentaries. I am an author of the books: Henryka Krzywonos’ biography Big Solidarity, small solidarity (2010) and Cinema is a Survival School (interview with Polish ilm director Małgorzata Szumowska, 2012), co-author of children’s book Cooperation (2013). In Krytyka 100 Polityczna (Political Critique), I coordinate local network activities, social campaigns about women’s rights, critical art and culture; I am also responsible for international cooperation. I am a columnist for the Opinion Daily and Editor of PoliticalCritique.org “In many places in Europe we need to ‘rebuild the cities’ by rebuilding human relations and mutual trust. In Poland we rebuild the cities, touching upon local histories. Because of the post-socialist transition in the last quarter-century many industries collapsed, lots of people lost their jobs but also their biographies. They have no right to be proud of their working in a place that has now become a symbol of the whole discredited past. Due to history and economy changing, small towns have lost not only their working places but also infrastructure, including local cinemas or culture centres, which collapsed without public support. People started moving to bigger urban centres, but those who stayed in these places have lots of work to do. Namely, to ‘rebuild the(ir) cities’.” Rana Zincir Celal Columbia Global Centers - Turkey Advisor to Connected Action for the Commons I’m a Senior Program Manager with Columbia University’s Global Center in Istanbul, where I work with our New York faculty in connecting their programs to Turkey. Our programs reach across a number of topics: freedom of expression, sustainability, historical dialogue and reconciliation, gender and art history. All of these we seek to approach from global, local and interdisciplinary perspectives, as we try to work out how to be a globally engaged university in the 21st century. In the past I served as a jury member for the ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture, have worked for international grant-making organisations and designed a number of educational and cultural projects in Cyprus. I’m also a board member of Greenpeace Mediterranean, Anadolu Kultur, the Hrant Dink Human Rights Award jury committee and the Greek Turkish Forum. “Beyond the reign of econometrics, diferent politics need to be reinstated, placing peace and solidarity above a blind idelity to the rules. Only politics that take into account more – culture, history, natural and human ecology – can be more than the sum of their parts. Only such politics can ‘grow’, not in economic, but in human terms.” – Zdenka Badovinac, Bart de Baere, Manuel Borja-Villel, Charles Esche, Vasif Kortun, Natasa Petresin-Bachelez, Steven Ten Thije, How Much Austerity Can Europe Endure? 101 102 Spaces for Arts, Welfare and Progress Mohab Saber 103 Botkyrka City Makers Organisation Multicultural Centre City Fittja, Botkyrka The municipal foundation Multicultural Centre in Fittja is promoting a society where diversity is relected in the Swedish national identity. In partnership with local as well as international organisations, they’ve created an array of campaigns (one of the latest ones being an interesting anti-prejudice/rumour campaign), research projects and exhibitions focusing on social and cultural diversity. Organisation Fittjaköket + FörOrten City Fittja, Botkyrka Fittjaköket + FörOrten is Botkyrka konsthall’s extended programme in Fittja. It is a meeting place for the community, artists, architects, chefs and others to develop ideas about how a future art institution can form in Fittja. In a few years Botkyrka konsthall will open a new space for art in Fittja. During our visit we’ll meet representatives from both organisations introducing us to what and how they have reasoned in developing the work as well as the challenges they are facing in their neighbourhood. As a bonus, you will get to walk along Albysjön (Alby lake) and see Fittja. 104 Organisation Områdesgruppen City Alby, Botkyrka Områdesgruppen [The Area group] is a dialogue forum where civil society, business, public companies and oicials join to recommend and discuss changes in the suburb of Alby. Meeting on a regular basis also adds to the interconnectivity between the actors in diferent areas of work, but within the same geography. A lot of the development that has been made in the area can be related to input and suggestions from this group. Organisation The Heart of Alby City Alby, Botkyrka The Heart of Alby is a long sought after and newly inaugurated Recreation/Community Centre for Youth. The inclusive approach used in designing the centre and its future activities is novel, at least by Swedish standards. Following that we’ll talk to the local athletics organisations regarding their engagement and input in the new Public Health Park in Alby. On the way, we will be able to point out some truly interesting ideas for Alby as well as present some of the local challenges. 105 Meet the Team Karin Lekberg Managing Director Subtopia Katherine Watson Director ECF Programme 106 Vivian Paulissen Knowledge Manager ECF Ludvig Duregård Project Manager Subtopia Lore Gablier Programme Oicer Networked Programme ECF Anders Lindgren Operations Manager KLUMP Subtopia R&D Grants Charles Beckett Programme Oicer Networked Programme ECF Production Sara Olsson Executive Producer Subtopia Maite García Lechner Programme Manager Networked Programme ECF Olga Alexeeva Programme Oicer Networked Programme ECF Björn Eriksson Technical Coordinator Subtopia Kerstin Fagervall Operations Manager Events Subtopia 107 Relations & Advocacy Szilvia Kochanowski Programme Oicer Networked Programme ECF Menno Weijs Programme Oicer Networked Programme ECF Marjolein Cremer Project Oicer Advocacy ECF Nicola Mullenger Programme Oicer Networked Programme ECF Maria Virto Marcilla Funding and Partnerships Manager ECF Chrissie Faniadis Fund development Subtopia Press & Communications Joseina Larsson Press Manager Subtopia 108 Rosa Koenen Communications Oicer ECF Hospitality Helena Rytilahti Grants Administrator ECF Katarina Ståhl Marketing Assistant Subtopia ECF Labs Gunilla Redelius Online Community Management ECF Gianfranco Pooli Programme Manager ECF Joined by Isabelle Schwarz Head of Advocacy, Research and Development ECF Enrica Flores d’Arcais Head of Business Development and Communications ECF Tsveta Andreeva Policy Oicer Advocacy ECF 109 About the Idea Camp and R&D Grants Initiated in 2014, the annual Idea Camp is run by ECF together with the six hubs in the Connected Action for the Commons programme, and with input from a committee of expert advisors. It follows an open call for daring ideas to build societies with greater equality, sustainability and solidarity. From the proposals we receive, 50 Idea Makers are invited to join the three-day programme of the Idea Camp. They are encouraged to investigate and further develop their ideas, exchange knowledge and ind new collaborations, connect with practitioners from diferent sectors, and explore new democratic alternatives. Following the Idea Camp, participants are invited to submit a concrete plan for further research or further investigation of their ideas. A total of 25 proposals are selected and awarded an R&D grant, up to a maximum €10,000. The grant enables the research and development of, for example: business plans, concrete project proposals, prototypes, publications and research papers. 110 Colophon Editing Vicky Anning, Charles Beckett, Lore Gablier Proofreading Vicky Anning Graphic design Martin Takken, Tom Zandwijken Coordination Rosa Koenen, Jeske van Vossen Published by the European Cultural Foundation in the framework of the Idea Camp ‘Build the City’, Botkyrka, 23-25 September 2015. culturalfoundation.eu Creative Commons License by-nc-sa 3.0 111 Connected Action for the Commons IdeaCamp2015 Build the City 23–25 September 2015 • Botkyrka • Sweden Culture 2 Commons: Alliance Operation City - operacijagrad.net, Clubture Network - clubture.org, Right to the City - pravonagrad.org Les Têtes de l’Art - lestetesdelart.fr Oberliht - oberliht.com Platoniq - youcoop.org, goteo.org Political Critique/Krytyka Polityczna - krytykapolityczna.pl Subtopia - subtopia.se European Cultural Foundation - culturalfoundation.eu CULTURE 2 COMMONS with support of 112 • Culture 2 Commons • Les Têtes de l’Art • Oberliht • Platoniq • Krytyka Polityczna • Subtopia Connected Action for the Commons Idea Camp is organised within the frame of Connected Action for the Commons, an action-research programme by the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) and six cultural hubs in Europe. Idea Camp brings together 50 inspirational Idea Makers from all across Europe and neighbouring regions. It is a collaborative working platform, a safe and open space for sharing and co-creation that will address some of the most urgent challenges facing our continent. Idea Camp acts as a meeting ground and community of practice that includes some of Europe’s leading thinkers, key policy-makers, engaged foundations, community hubs and change-makers with a shared commitment to strengthening the commons. www.culturalfoundation.eu/idea-camp-2015/