Rethink Re:Place is a New Union project that makes place-making user-friendly by offering training opportunities and upskilling techniques. The toolkit serves as a support and toolbox for all municipalities, associations, planners on how to design the post-COVID-19-city and engage the community through Tactical Urbanism.
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How to engage a community, re-connect people to place and build resilience? A question that is currently even more important in the face of the coronavirus crisis. Tactical urbanism, for example, is an innovative approach to transform public space and engage community. Through low-cost, temporary changes to a built environment, tactical urbanism creates greater sense of place in local neighbourhoods and city. New Union, a UK-based not-for-profit civic innovation organization, provides a toolkit, that is free and opensource, and includes all the materials you need to run your own tactical urbanism training workshop. The toolkit makes tactical urbanism accessible to all, encouraging participation through hands-on activities. The in-depth guide to the workshop means anyone from any area of expertise can facilitate the workshop. To download the toolkit, visit: www.new-union.org/rethinkreplace.html
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The toolkit is based on the Rethink Re:Place festival, that was run in February 2021 by UK based volunteer activists to inspire people to think differently about how change can be made in urban space and to catalyse conversations around the opportunities of tactical urbanism for cities post-COVID-19. More than 100 people over five continents were involved in the festival, including urban planners and designers, city councillors, policy officers, activists, and university students.
Tactical Urbanism: hands-on influence
Organised by New Union, Director Nathan Coyle explained: “We had no intention of trying to find funding for the festival as we wanted it to be 100 per cent organically created and facilitated by activists who are passionate about the community having a hands-on influence over where they live. It was really important to us that there was a lasting legacy, that’s why we wanted to put together the toolkit so towns and cities all over the world can download and benefit from it, for no cost at all”.
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According to New Union the workshop can help you if: You have community groups or Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) in your area that want to learn how to improve their community spaces using a limited or non-existent budget. Or if: You want to learn how to build narratives from the activities that your community do.
The Graz Museum is hosting a festival exhibition entitled The City as Data Field. How we want to live in the future. It raises the question of how individuals and society are doing with global networking, “Big Data” and “navigating through data”. “First we make the data, then they make us” – what possibilities of “humanization” (Flusser) does technology open up, what do we need to pay attention to? The exhibition runs until 29th August 2021 and is one of the larger projects of the extended cultural year 2020 and belongs to the thematic focus “Digital Living Worlds”.
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The narrative of The City as a Data Field. How We Want to Live in the Future follows images proposed by the philosopher of technology Vilém Flusser and his plea for moving towards “designing fate” and venturing utopia as a playful testing of alternative possibilities of a “decent” life in response to the crisis. According to Flusser, the “we” to be reconfigured could be “no longer subject to values, but composes them instead.”
The City as a Data Field: The ubiquity of data control in public and private products and services
Flusser’s visionary background provides the stage for addressing the conflict between efficiency and optimisation versus personal and collective freedom of choice. The City as a Data Field. How We Want to Live in the Future is about the advance of data-driven automatic control into more and more intimate personal spheres of life. Whether “smart city”, “smart home”, choice of partner and family planning, body implant or child rearing – the ubiquity of data control in public and private products and services in the post-digital age of Industry 4.0 demands a reflection on the goals that guide us.
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Three performative formats that invite repeated active participation
- Festival and interactive exhibition in ten themed rooms on the ground floor and 2nd floor of the Graz Museum—with high-level international artworks, historical technical objects and themed installations.
- Ten-week discourse festival on the themes of the exhibition spaces, partly in the Graz Museum and Graz Museum Schlossberg as well as at striking cultural locations with lectures on the individual themes and participation by Graz-based initiatives.
- Thematic tours on changing focal points such as data economy, privacy, security and much more.
- Accompanying and in-depth discursive web format that also assumes the function of a catalogue that will perpetuate the exhibition.
Festival exhibition with different dimensions
- dynamic, not static; it responds to visitors and changes over time. A performative exhibition in which the contradictory nature of the creative forces and the open-endedness of the development of technology are introduced (not resolved).
- metaphorical, a “stage play in ten images”; it begins with Peter Weibel’s and Christian Lölkes’ eponymous work “The World as s Field of Data”, in which one no longer navigates by the stars but by data, and ends where one is as close to the stars as nowhere else in Graz: on the Schlossberg, near Richard Kriesche’s ARTSAT disc with a workshop to release a manifesto: “How We Want to Live in the Future”.
- contradictory; it leads us into contradictions and experiences, into feelings about the world, but it never radiates powerlessness or dystopia, but confidence; it is about decent living without giving concrete directions. The question is not how I want to live but how we want to live.
- participatory; the festival format invites active participation.
For more information click here.
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Curators: Peter Rantaša, Otto Hochreiter
Exhibition design and graphic design: BUERO41A
Exhibition design ground floor: studio-itzo
Project controlling: Sibylle Dienesch
Project management: Johanna Fiedler, Angela Rossmann, Franziska Schurig
Text Credits: Graz Museum
In the summer of 2022, Helsingborg invites the world to be a part of their H22 City Expo and ‘Urban Future’ will kick off the Expo on June 1 to 3, 2022.
The mid-sized Swedish city of Helsingborg is one of the most innovative and fastest transforming in Europe. A radical reorganisation of their internal structure has enabled them to race forward with innovation and sustainability at full speed. Urban Future is proud to kick off Helsingborg’s H22 City Expo, where the city will showcase its work so far and open up the city as a testbed and platform for collective global action.
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Preparing for the summer of 2022
“We want Helsingborg and the H22 City Expo to be the obvious international meeting place, where actors who work to make cities more sustainable meet and exchange experiences to accelerate this work globally. Therefore, we are incredibly happy that Urban Future sees Helsingborg and H22 City Expo as the natural arena for all ‘CityChangers’ in the summer of 2022”, says Lars Thunberg, Deputy Mayor, City of Helsingborg.
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Helsingborg: Co-creating a city that puts people and planet first
Gerald Babel-Sutter, CEO and Co-founder of Urban Future: “By sheer citizen numbers, Helsingborg will be our smallest ever host city. But at the same time, it will be one of the most innovative! Rarely do you find cities that are able to transform themselves so fast and so radically as is the case with Helsingborg. That’s why we’re so excited to bring the CityChangers community here, as the message for the world is clear: you don’t need to be a big city to drive change successfully! Everywhere in Helsingborg, you can see and feel the passion for driving change and innovation – so what better place could there be to meet and inspire open minds?”
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Urban Future Helsingborg 22 anticipates the participation of international decision-makers, influencers, and change agents who all work tirelessly to make cities more sustainable the world over.
In recent years, the municipality of Helsingborg has completely changed its mindset and way of collaborating with citizens, businesses, innovators, academia and other stakeholders in order to make change happen. Through the massive H22 initiative, Helsingborg is working with like-minded partners near and far.
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Urban Future is building digital bridges
The recent months have proven that digital alternatives cannot replace the energy in a room full of game-changers, the moment when you randomely meet a speaker you’re admiring over a cup of coffee, or when you’re cycling the city’s newest bike lanes with a group of cycling enthusiasts! Urban decision-makers especially need to see, feel, and get inspired by other urban places and neighbourhoods – li ve on-site.
But, in addition to the annual live event, building digital bridges will be a fantastic way to support urbanists from near and far over the upcoming months, where physical meetings are still challenging to organise while the pandemic rages on. Currently, there is a virtual event in the making that will be held by the end of September 2021. This virtual event will premiere a digital home base for the global community of around 50,000 CityChangers. The digital home base will provide the collective know-how and expertise of hundreds of experts – 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, free of charge. Users will also be able to generate and contribute their own content and connect with like-minded change-makers from hundreds of cities.
About ‘Urban Future’
Urban Future is the world’s largest meeting place for CityChangers, people who strive to make their cities more sustainable with passion and commitment. They implement tangible projects, thus vastly improving life in their city. Urban Future brings together our brightest minds, presenting itself as a neutral platform without any political agenda. The conference was co-founded in 2014 by Gerald Babel-Sutter and has taken place in a different European city every year. Since 2014, visitor numbers have tripled. The 2020 edition in Lisbon had to be cancelled due to Covid-19. 2021 will see the first fully-virtual event and will launch a new digital home base for CityChangers around the world.
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For more informatuon about Urban Future Helsingborg 22 click here.
Text Credits: Urban Future, UFGC
Rome – the eternal city. To architect Chiara Dorbolò the Italian capital is anything but eternal. On the contrary, its unique character is the result of a sometimes violent juxtaposition of different and transient identities: The authoritarian and the rebellious, the formal and the spontaneous, the new and the old, the devoted and the careless. In times of the coronavirus a new identity has arisen and another vanished: The empty and the overcrowded. In a way, the absence of urban life brings Rome back to its promised eternity.
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Last weeks’ footage of Rome has a confounding familiarity to it. Its streets emptied by the government response to the pandemic, the eternal city seems to have finally honoured its reputation, suspended in a timeless state devoid of human life. Yet, the photos of the Spanish Steps, one of the city’s most famous tourist attractions, only depict the final stage of a process already started in 2016, when the monumental stairway was cleaned as part of a costly Bulgari-funded operation. After the marble was returned to its original white, some suggested fencing off the area off and locking it overnight to avoid a quick return to old habits and dirt. The proposal was rejected, but then in June 2019 the municipality issued a ban on sitting, eating, or drinking on the Spanish Steps and other monumental stairways. While policemen monitored the steps, whistling at incredulous tourists, Roman intellectuals were divided between those in favour of protecting the monuments and those who considered the ban an overly authoritarian measure. This coming summer the debate will not arise again.
“The city centre has become an open-air museum, where speculation has gradually forced out local residents and activities.”
Until last year Rome was the main tourist destination in a country that relies heavily on tourism for its gross domestic product. In the effort to monetise its historical heritage, the city has faced the same difficulties as other European tourist hotspots such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, and London. The city centre has become an open-air museum, where speculation has gradually forced out local residents and activities. A common example is Campo de’ Fiori, the famous square where the 17th-century philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake as a heretic. The only important square in Rome without a church, it was historically associated with the tension between Catholicism and secularism. It was a meeting place for hippies in the ‘60s and feminists in the ‘70s, and later it became very popular among foreign students and professionals (mostly American) in Rome. A couple of decades ago, despite the already numerous tourists, and the chaos often wrought by football fans on weekend nights, the area was still home to a lot of permanent residents. Every morning, they would stroll the market stalls set up at dawn by farmers coming from the city’s outskirts. Now the market is still there, but no one is doing their grocery shopping there. Produce has been mostly replaced by souvenirs, fruit salads to go, and local delicacies. The clochards, artists and activists who used to populate the square have given way to weekend travellers and tourism workers; shops have turned into restaurants and bars, and apartments into short-stay accommodations.
“Have Romans given up on their city centre?”
As the tourist area expands, a similar process is affecting other, not so central neighbourhoods as well. In Monti and Pigneto, for example, local movements are now recognising and strongly opposing gentrification. A notable example is the Ex SNIA, an artificial lake born from a real estate mishap and then reclaimed by the neighbourhood as a public asset. And yet, cases of angered residents fighting speculation in central areas are quite rare. For the most part, opposition to gentrification in the city centre stems from intellectuals who strive to save specific cultural sites rather than social movements opposing a broad urban phenomenon. In a city where the boundary between the centre and the periphery is far from being clear-cut, newer neighbourhoods’ social fabric seems to reflect a stronger identification with the urban context. Have Romans given up on their city centre? Probably not.
“Allowing the city to coexist with tourism without losing herself in it.”
We just believe the identity of the city to be immortal. With our special kind of cynicism, we dismiss every change as temporary and insignificant, in the face of what the city has experienced in its almost 3000 years of life. But the eternal city is not eternal. On the contrary, its unique character is the result of the sometimes violent juxtaposition of different and transient identities: The authoritarian and the rebellious, the formal and the spontaneous, the new and the old, the devoted and the careless. This complexity, rather than the white marble of the Spanish Steps, is what needs to be protected − and not from an invasion by ill-behaved tourists but from the speculative, extractive and toxic relationship that tied them to the city. Perhaps the relaunch of the tourist sector that will inevitably follow the end of this pandemic can be used to set the course straight, allowing the city to coexist with tourism without losing herself in it.
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Chiara Dorbolò is an independent architect and researcher. She studied in Rome and in Amsterdam and currently works as a contributing editor to Failed Architecture. She teaches architectural theory and practice at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam.
Read this Metropolis Explained and other articles in topos 111.
Mexico’s capital is a complex and contradictory place. As the saying here goes, there is not one Mexico City, there are many Mexico Cities. Indeed, sprawling shantytowns coexist with gated communities. Fourhour commutes are a reality for many, while helipads crown developments for the uber-rich. The metropolis’ history is equally surreal and tumultuous. Once the heart of the Aztec civilization, it has since seen waves of colonizers come and go. But over the course of half a millennium, it has become accustomed to ongoing conflicts and crises and has developed an incredible resilience. In the face of countless challenges including inequality, pollution, crime and corruption, the megalopolis has learned to bounce back and life continues unceasingly with will power and vitality that will stop at nothing.
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While the country wrestles with the increasingly gruesome violence spurred by the nation’s drug war, Mexico’s vibrant capital seems to dance to its own beat. Forget what you think you know about “el monstruo”, as the city has been known in the past, and you will be surprised to find a cultural epicentre bursting at the seams with fresh, raw energy.
“A cultural epicentre bursting at the seams with fresh, raw energy.”
Chefs are cooking up a new culinary movement by remixing age-old pre-hispanic recipes. The city’s flourishing contemporary art scene has led many to call it the next Berlin. And a new generation of architects is pursuing an architecture that is both contemporary and timeless, Mexican in its extraordinary sensuality and material sensitivity, yet by no means folkloric. Add to that a veritable renaissance in the film, fashion and design scenes and it becomes easy to understand why young creatives have started to stream in from all corners of the world. Key to Me-Mo – as this “Mexican Moment” has been affectionately dubbed – is the rediscovery of a number of decaying historic neighbourhoods located adjacent to the old city centre. A devastating 8.1-magnitude earthquake in 1985, exacerbated by the fact that the city is built on the unstable and sinking ground of a dried-out lake bed, had killed more than 3,000 and led many to relocate from these areas to the city’s outskirts in search of the safety of the bedrock. In the following years, insecurity led to an increase in gated communities. Urban life became more and more segregated.
Since then, however, the city has gone through a catharsis. In recent years, neighbourhoods such as La Condesa with its stunning Art Deco architecture and lush parks have been rediscovered and are in a process of reinvention. In the eclectic colonia Roma dilapidated French-style mansions from the turn of the last century have been retrofitted and transformed into art galleries and restaurants. The municipality’s investment in upgrading public space has breathed new life into these barrios’ plazas and tree-lined boulevards. While 15 years ago cycling in the city was unthinkable there is now an abundance of bike-sharing schemes and use of the automobile is being disincentivized. The rehabilitation of these central districts goes hand in hand with their redensification. In a sense, the metropolis’ seemingly endless sprawl has reached its physical limits, a necklace of mountains and volcanoes, and the city has started to fold back on itself.
“The metropolis’ seemingly endless sprawl has reached its physical limits.”
About six years ago, the government introduced zoning modifications that combat urban sprawl. While applaudable in principle, this shift in policy opened the floodgates for high-rise office towers like the ones popping up relentlessly along the city’s principal avenue Reforma. Mono-programmatic ghettos for ultrawealthy corporations, they have exacerbated traffic problems and put a significant strain on the city’s service infrastructure. Luckily though, private actors have started to step up to the challenge of sustainable densification. Young developers with a keen passion for architecture are championing the adaptive reuse and extension of historic properties.
“The city centre is virtually bursting with the energy of the reinvention.”
Their projects are highly dense despite being low- to mid-rise and cater to a more tenable mix of use and income. The urban model of radiating growth is thus being challenged by a new ideal: one of restoring, adapting and upgrading the historic urban fabric. As a consequence, the city centre is virtually bursting with the energy of the reinvention. The main beneficiaries of this tendency are of yet a privileged elite. While it remains to be seen whether the more than 20 million inhabitants outside of this gentrification bubble will benefit from this new urbanity, there is optimism in the air. New government incentives are targeting corruption and pollution while poverty is being countered by the growth of the country’s middle class. Give it some time and the Mexican spirit of persistence might just deliver.
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Max von Werz is a German architect who has lived in Mexico City since 2014. He studied at the Architectural Association in London and after gaining extensive work experience with David Chipperfield Architects and Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, established his own architecture practice in 2013 with a particular interest in adaptive reuse, housing and projects related to the arts.
Read this Metropolis Explained and other articles in topos 110.
The Renaissance has shown that creative, unconventional ideas and plans have arisen as a result of necessity. Leonardo da Vinci was one of those who developed ideas for the “ideal city” to solve urban problems of his era. In times of climate crisis, his sketches and ideas are still relevant today, as he designed urban concepts that are efficient and ecologically and socially sustainable. The unconventionality of da Vinci, who is celebrating his 500th anniversary this year, is more in demand than ever.
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The Renaissance is feted as a period of incredible progress in art and architecture, but we tend to forget that the 15th century also marked the birth of urbanism as a true discipline. For this reason, today more than ever, it may be useful to approach the heroic figures of 15th century architecture and urban planning to learn how they believed we could revolutionize the world for the better.
Leonardo Da Vinci is the quintessential Renaissance Man, not only for his polygraphic personality, talent and inexhaustible curiosity, but above all for having radically renewed the perspective of the world that surrounded him. Memorable pages have been written rebranding Leonardo’s science and art: his anatomical studies, flying and war machines have no comparable precedents, yet it has not been emphasized enough that Leonardo also invented some of the essential modern principles of urban planning, including biophilia, and he made extensive use of biomimetic tools in environmental design and planning.
Leonardo rethinks the design of medieval cities, with their winding and overcrowded streets and with houses piled against one another, and presents to us the foundation of a new city along the Ticino River, one with clean urban spaces and designed for the easy transport of goods. It is a modern and rational city, consistent with Renaissance ideals.
Unconventional design, Unconventional personality
Leonardo planned a comfortable and spacious city, with well-ordered streets and architecture, and recommended “high, strong walls”, with “towers and battlements of all necessary and pleasant beauty.” Furthermore, his city needed both “the sublimity and magnificence of a holy temple” and “the convenient composition of private homes”.
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What sets Leonardo’s city apart are his personal touches, flashes of his unconventional personality. Leonardo included several innovations in his urban design. He wanted the city to be built on different levels, linked with vertical staircases. Elegant palaces and wide streets would occupy the upper levels of the city, where people could walk undisturbed at their leisure. Services, trade, transport and industry on the other hand would be restricted to the lower level, tucked away from sight.
It is a design that is familiar to us from high-rise buildings, but was totally unconventional at the time. Indeed, his idea of maximising interior spaces by placing staircases on the outside of buildings didn’t find support until the Modernist movement, at the start of the twentieth century.
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The whole article about the “ideal city” of da Vinci can be found in topos 107.
Globally, agglomerations are attractive to the population in rural areas and are therefore constantly growing. Also in Europe, there has been an increase in migratory movements from the countryside to the city, so city planning is facing new challenges. On 16th of May, the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences is organizing a conference about the subject. Under the title “Europe’s Agglomerations – Challenges to Planning and Building”, experts and participants exchange views on the trend.
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Opportunities and limitations of urban development
The aim of the conference is to identify the opportunities and limitations of urban development. For this purpose, current research results and solutions are to be discussed and evaluated. To deal with the complex subject matter, the congress deals with building-related, legal and economic aspects as well as social and cultural developments. The broad topic area is divided into two forums, in which the participants can inform themselves and exchange information through speeches and discussions. While Forum I deals with business, law and infrastructure, Forum II concerns with gentrification, dependency on the car and the digitalisation of planning data. Afterwards, the challenges of growth in terms of their ecological and social aspects are discussed in a joint forum.
Participation and Recognition
Participation fee: 90 € | Student price: 30 €
More information can be found here.
