After my first impressions, here is my slideshow I used on the first day of UrbanLabs. I was given the possibility to held a brief presentation before the participants in the group proposed some projects and then started to gather in order to talk about those projects.
We all were not sure about presentations, because we [...]

Tags: City, Community, Innovation, Open P2P Communities, Social Innovation, Spain

A week after UrbanLabs 08, I can finally write a post (the first of 3 posts) with my general impressions about it while I caught the flu!
It was an event that I’ve been waiting for since several months, and that by its nature it was very quickly between so many changes in language between [...]

Tags: City, Community, Innovation, Social Innovation, Spain, Technology

And the second announcement refers to the UrbanLabs 08 event, which will be held on 9-10-11 October 2008 in the Citilab-Cornellà (Barcelona), a space designed to activate, promote and expand the creative and innovative capacity in technology entrepreneurs, companies, citizens of the information and knowledge society and knowledge.
The aim of the event is to think [...]

Tags: City, Enabler, Information Society, Institutions, Locality, Open P2P Communities, Social Innovation, Spain

A complexity culture, especially in the design field, has to pass through the dissemination of an aesthetic of complexity too.
Therefore, projects that derive from concepts of complexity, even if just superficially (and so are not complex nor systemic projects) are important for their ability to spread in society an aesthetics of complexity.
Such a project can [...]

Tags: Aesthetics, City, Complexity, Design, Fractals, Spain

City Hacking #02: Design Pubblico (by esterni)

Barefootpaths

In cities that are no longer communities, where estranged citizens go through the same paths every day and hardly ever get closer, design pubblico promotes another way of living collective places together, a conception of “public space” as opposed to the preeminence of “private time”; first-hand visions instead [...]

Tags: City, Design, Locality, Strategic Design

City Hacking #01: Urban Cup Holder

The aim of the urban cup holder is to encourage people to reinterpret street settings and claim them as their territory, instead of just using them as a means of passage from A to B. The cup holder is easily clamped with one hand to posts in the street, then [...]

Tags: City, Locality, Product Design

People Make Places

People Make Places, Melissa Mean, Charlie Tims, Demos, London (2005), (pdf file, in english)

Based on in-depth studies of three British towns and cities Cardiff, Preston and Swindon, People Make Places explores how the best public spaces are created by people and communities themselves. The book sets out the forms of governance, design principles [...]

Tags: Architectural Design, City, City Planning, Co-Creation, Community, Emergence, Institutions, Local Services, Locality, Participation, Self-Organization, UK