“Human Cities” works out the concept of improving the relationship of people towards the public space considered as a common good. Its complementary targets are to provide a real empowerment to citizens and motivate public authorities to develop an interdisciplinary creative process for a better sustainable living in today’s cities. In this European project design appears in its process, as an effective methodology and approach for achieving a participative and “eco-activist” model for improving ever-changing but sustainable city developments.
Appearing on a new blank page, Human Cities’ concept has been created and launched by Pro Materia in 2006 at Flagey in Brussels at the occasion of the interdisciplinary symposium entitled “Human Cities: sustainable urban design”. Acting now as a European network of creative cities, this cutting-edge concept is funded by the EU Culture 2007-2013 Program. It opens the door to extensive city collaborations between Brussels (BE), Glasgow (UK), Milan (IT) and Ljubljana (SLO). In the near future, we are looking to share the project with more cities in Europe or at an international level, the objective being to enter into this dynamic city design process.
From November 2008, Human Cities has been implemented by five active institutions and partners:
Human Cities offers a series of innovative views and contributions to the public space and urban fabric which are emerging more and more as a field of creative intervention and collaboration between artists, designers, architects, sociologists, writers and philosophers, urban planners and landscape architects. This interdisciplinary approach of the Human Cities network, researches and action program has enhanced, since its launching in November 2008, the emergence of creative cities seen much as a laboratory for informal, temporary, creative performances and installations of static or moving forms and objects challenging our existing art, architecture and design stereotypes.
Sustainability and creativity in urban design are also more and more connected to educational and participative programs reaching all kind of public within the already explored and not yet studied urban territories. Both are also linked to more dense digital and media environments surrounding us as well as to the ephemeral, the temporary and the creation of new typologies of public space where creative people can meet, play, live and enjoy the site specificity and qualities of the places to be.
Places to be are tackling the design multiple and multicultural facets of the urban fabric. This topic has been used as the main theme for the Human Cities Call for Entries, which was launched during springtime 2009 and succeeded in obtaining around 70 proposals. A jury composed of the Human Cities network selected thirty projects to be exhibited in the public space in Brussels (BE) during the Human Cities Festival at Bozar / Cinematek and around. Half of the projects are videos and photographs, and some of them are real-life objects, installations and urban performances. The international dimension is really strong knowing that the projects came from all corners of the world such as India, Israel, Japan, the United States, Australia, South Africa, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Belgium, France…
In fact, European cities today face both frightening threats and exhilarating challenges, becoming harder to manage and to understand, while fostering their role as the drivers and hubs of our economies. Not only must they compete in attractiveness, in order to encourage talents—both creative and academic—to move in (or not to move abroad), they also need to create a framework that promotes their human capital, while coping with social fragmentation and sustainability. Human Cities as a project and philosophy is therefore positioning itself towards artifacts and spontaneous creations, which are seen and perceived in their uses, living scenarios as well as in their complex urban perspectives.
Human Cities symposium and festival is therefore willing to bring together pioneering institutions from all over Europe as well as international actors who are willing to share ideas and projects at a city level. All of them have actively developed new methods and approaches to urban design as a kind of promise for a better and more human-oriented environment. They are exchanging the differentiated ways in which they respond to today’s challenges, bringing forward the lessons learned from their most successful experiences.
The public space festival program in Brussels aims at reaching the largest number of people as possible and at fostering public commitment right in the prominent public spaces and through socio-cultural institutions that are running relevant Human Cities projects in locations such as city squares and gardens, inner-city parks, busy thoroughfares or hidden alleyways, disused industrial sites... Real life installations and productions will challenge the unpredictable and informal human interventions. Human Cities could hopefully become the European reference for an upcoming Human Cities design and hacking culture. It would become part of the urban regeneration process as well as it would propose alternative renewal strategies for the community through creative “places to be”.
Design in the urban perspective comprises all the artifacts that are related to places and cities environments and are interconnected to their users. It is an ongoing process which replaces the urban dwellers as well as the creative minds in their context of a contemporary city culture and underlines its effects on real life situations and site-specific installations in the public space. Recently described by Richard Thieme (O’Reilly Network) and the Graffiti Research Lab, both mainly active in the United States as researchers, the hacking culture can be defined as “the means and methodology by which we construct more comprehensive truths or images of the systems we hack”. This same spirit can be applied to urban interventions by hacking into the existing or re-invented language and codes of the city to create a greater sense of understanding and a connection between individuals. Some past and current initiatives underline this type of “bottom up” policies. The Australian curator Steffen Lehmann is describing them in his exhibition and book “Back to the City, Strategies for Informal Urban Interventions – Collaborations between Artists and Architects”. Organised in Newcastle (Australia) in collaboration with Berlin (Germany), this very recent urban project is full of creative inspiration. All the information is accessible on the website www.slab.com.au. Some other events that caught the attention were the ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam and Lisboa which happened in 2008 and 2009. In its book and city tour in Amsterdam, Scott Burnham stressed the idea of Urban Play working closely with Droog Design organizing the happenings Droog Event 2 as a way to enhance International Unauthorized Collaborations and Urban Interventions. The subtitle of his book is even called “The Amsterdam Route : New Catalysts for Public Play and Interaction in the City” and shows how spontaneous creativity can influence the urban environment and lifestyle. Those initiatives are well developed on the following websites : www.experimentadesign.nl, www.urbanplay.org, www.droog.com and are closely bound to value design as a source of human added value regarding the respect, protection, participation and interaction of the people within a space which is not only public but common to everyone who deal with it.
With the first edition of Human Cities Festival in Brussels, from 6 until 16 May 2010, supported by the Brussels Region, the City of Brussels among other partners, the events profile is close to this emerging move towards urban co-creation of the public and common space. This deep trend is currently flowering North and South to East and West and is really present at an international level. Even the Universal Exhibition in Shanghai is tackling the topic of “Better City, Better Living” from May 2010. To come back to Human Cities Festival, it includes further in its connections and program, among others, associations and partners such as the Public Design Festival (Esterni, Milan, IT), Prostoroz (Ljubljana, SLO)… In Brussels, there are organizations such as Recyclart, the contemporary art center The Wiels, Brass, Citymined, Bozar, Bozarshop, the Cinematek, the Creative Space Kreon and the KunstenfestivaldesArts, the Brussels Region ‘Fête de l’Iris’ which are motivated by the HC initiative. HC Festival aims at putting a stress on the concept of cohabitation as one way of sharing the common space and to attract people to exchange their perception – either positive or negative – about the existing or dreamed place to be. Designed objects and city installations, which are worked out at a city scale, can become, in that sense, visual and symbolic references of our urban and social environment. As citizens, we need in fact to have some positive and creative relationships to artifacts and, more and more, to more sensual and tactile objects. This evolution is certainly due to the ever-changing developments of the digital society and the immaterial world surrounding us.
By celebrating public space as a common good, Human Cities Festival is encountering the large move of cities towards a better quality of environment and everyday life. The misunderstanding of the urban place or the misuse of public space is to be seen as a work in progress of our cities. Those ones have to deal with all type of urban issues such as architectural heritage, which has to cope with a contemporary culture and the desire of people of being part of the “urban game” without excluding values and history. All those challenges are part of our future cities perceived as “design labs”, a recent concept, which has been promoted at the 12th Jacques Cartier’s Workshops in Saint-Etienne (FR) last November 2009. The main issues are how to imagine and create an adequate city life and environment for the 21st century? For the City of Montreal, the stakes are to create an innovation platform around urban design in order to accelerate change, to communicate and develop shared initiatives to benefit to everyone. Therefore, the design process itself appears to be one possible model for the future through public panels, workshops and competitions such as Human Cities. It also makes possible a larger participation of the people in interacting with each other and in participating into the transformation of their own life environment. Activism appears here to be a creative solution for living in the cities of tomorrow. Let’s imagine the alternative scenarios in a second edition of Human Cities Festival around the idea of “reclaiming public space”. Brussels will become therefore a real design city lab. Labeled by the Belgian Presidency to the European Union, Human Cities could become in the future the adequate city hub for the public authorities in Europe to understand how to better manage the common goods.
Lise Coirier & Chantal Vanoeteren
Contemporary towns are characterised by their polyphony. To those who walk through them, or have a use for them, it conveys a whole range of impressions, which in most cases, result from the many layers upon which they were built up. But towns are also dynamic: they have a continuous life of their own, they change… And this permanent movement can also be understood as actors performing and leaving their print, marking space with their lasting or brief presence. A capacity for coexisting in the midst of differences, tolerance and benevolence towards others, urbanity is not only being elaborated but also tried within that permanent movement and that constant town regeneration.
What is crucially at stake in urbanity and particularly within what constitutes a privileged place – i.e. public space – is being present and making oneself able to be present in the town. This symposium will be elaborated around this topic. Unlike orientations focusing this presence on the only “participation” today, we shall put forward the many ways in which to be present for towns and in towns – the widespread exercise of political rights only being one aspect, albeit an important one. Therefore, we shall consider other manifestations of urban presence and in particular those meaningful, brief and anonymous manifestations, which do not really catch observers’ attention yet which sometimes have a deep “impact”. We shall pay particular attention to the forms of presence of the “weak actors”, often destined for a process of invisibility or for stigmatisation, but also to “creative actors”, those through whom a town reflects itself without this reflection necessarily or mainly heading towards argumentation. But, before anything else, perhaps we could question the responsibility held by those who are in charge of planning public spaces, of making them available and, therefore, of favouring the manifestation of urban presences and expressions. We think that, through its materiality, its organisation etc., a town presents as many supports and obstacles to those presences and that what is at stake there often is what is widely neglected in urban policies, due to a lack of “problematisation”.
Our symposium shall unfold round 4 axes. An explanation of what “urban presences” are today – those ways to live in towns –; an investigation for tools to observe and understand them – which also are ways to question towns –; an interrogation about the forms in which those presences try a town and open it to other possibilities – so many ways to suggest a town –; and an investigation about the concerned forms of public action – those innovating ways of deciding a town.
The presentations will emphasize one of the four perspectives described below.
This part will focus directly on the usages of public space, their forms, their conditions, their meanings, their interrelations... and on the means developed and taken by the users in order to manage and modulate their presence in the town. Focus will be particularly on user tactics of those who live and use the city.
From the academic world, researchers consider the town in terms of the way it is practiced and try to recognize the users. This focus will go further into methodologies specifically put in place by researchers to try to reveal and understand these types of presence. This part will particularly disclose methodological tactics of those who investigate the town.
This part will deal with various initiatives to support certain types of presence by stimulating, relieving or echoing certain users. This part will particularly focus on stimulating tactics of those who suggest and shape a certain town design.
Because they hold the reins for planning of public space, here we want to specifically question the position of decision takers. This part will particularly deal with political tactics of those who decide for the town.
Jean-Louis Genard & Sabine Guisse.