When searching for background information and papers about the future of cities i come across a variety of thinkers analysing the growth challenge and its direct effect on urban density and liveability. But for every paragraph I found about the human scale, I found pages about infrastructural impact studies. Taking for example the Atkins Global analyse about the cities of the future we get an inside at how designers, architects and engineers want to sculpt the city. But in which way do you give the choice toward the inhabitants to learn how to better a city.
Without sounding cliché, I believe in human centred design to better the liveability of future cities. Before presenting my thesis, we need to accept two premises:
- Cities in general go toward a higher urban density
- smaller private living spaces becoming the norm in cities
If we accept this reality, we should understand that people will be living much closer to each other while having to share smaller public space. This is why we see such an evolution on how city planners look at the space cars take, and are changing the paradigm. But what if this wasn’t enough? Denser space means more chances for friction, but also in the long term better liveability. So how do we shrink the gap towards better liveability without creating bigger economical gabs, also known as gentrification? What do we have to teach city-residents so a city creates good living conditions without throwing out the lesser fortunate.
The Brussels Case
I’m taking Brussels as the example, because I lived there for my whole live, counting twenty-nine winters at the moment, and know her biggest challenges and history on an urbanistic level.
At the moment there is an interesting debate going on through the means of Le Soir. Let’s call it #Bruxellespageblanche. The latest entry from Eric Corijn is the one that goes towards the story i want to contribute too. It’s about finally opening up the unthinkable: redistributing the localities into districts that are geographically, anthropologically and socially logical that are for the good of the region and its inhabitants that is Brussels.
The partial solution I want to present consists of two premises that together forms a factor to consider when (re)designing future, high density city districts.
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How the commons can help transiting towards a smaller economical gap -
Anonymousness as a factor of negative perception of the city
At the moment we are designing new areas often as single use spaces. We follow the rule of scarcity: when a city becomes denser, the space becomes more scarce, so the price will go up. We each fight for our personal space, and listen to the market or geolocal politics. You want your living space, your working space and your shopping space, but because of that you play along the classical market.
What if we shift from a scarcity model towards an model of abundance (like presented by the P2P foundation). We are starting to discover the benefits of open source knowledge and are opening up towards a sharing knowledge base through all kinds of different tools. We even have truly sharing economy initiatives like Tournevie or the crowdfunding platform Growfunding. Through this kind of initiatives we are developing a first grasp of what abundancy can be. But what if we infused these principles into legislation? Making abundancy a building block of the city of the future. Projects that work under collaborative principes, lowering their costs and environmental impact by cooperating and not compete with one another should be at the center of this new Brussels DNA.
Creating cooperatives dived over the different districts, where you could plug in into local actor when starting up projects should be the norm. It cost less energy to better existing project than to start everything on your own. It also cost less money, and that at the moment is not well balanced out at all in Brussels. We want to build a better Brussels, we only can do it if we learn to collaborate and break the invisible barriers created by the institutions.
But how do we get there? We are lacking one important skill to create this mutual, collaborative machine for Brussels futur: a trust membrane that builds up an easier way to read through the complex layers of human and organisation egos that are filled with good intentions but sometimes don’t want to work together because of lack of trust, or a badly build up relationship. If we want truly a #bruxellescarteblanche we need to look at the humain level too. Because after all we all have our egos, we all have our flaws.
That’s where i think anonymousness plays a significant role. If we want a thriving collaborative city, we need a city that is build on a human scale, and we need to invite people to meet each other more. Let’s throw those city marketing events out of the equation, let’s not continue to make the historic city center a disneyland for weekend tourist. But put local shops, cultural houses and social organisations at the center of this ‘de-anonymousness’. Creating much more connections with each other because even if we don’t want to, we will be forced to use the same space if we take my two first premises in consideration.
Let’s round this up and make it a bit political, since it is a election year. If we want to see a real change in Brussels, and this #bruxellescarteblanche is a great start, we need to reboot not only the way we build institutional infrastructures, but also how we create human interactions.
For me it is import to look into common based principles as a puzzle piece of the new toolbox. If we understand that abundance is a realistic way of creating solutions for the city, we can start getting around the drawing board. If we want that this drawing board doesn’t become a mess we need to train our collaborative skills by having much more shared experience.
At this moment i didn’t hear one program in the Brussels political scene opening up this debate, every single party thinks having all the pieces of the puzzle in their hand. We have 9 months to show them new possible puzzle pieces, let’s continue this debate!
P.S: all the links can be found here
Maybe it could be cool to have the possibility when copying a text, that the embedded links are taken with. Don’t know if that is feasable @noemi