LiveMapping – a work in progress (beta)
The problem with maps in an urban context is that they tend to simplify and fix a city that is complex and always changing.
Tag: Students
City Agency
We are working on setting up a City Agency in Hedehusene collaborating with universities in Copenhagen and engaging local citizens, municipalities, developers, media and businesses. The aim of such an agency is to strengthen the local community using methods that are locally relevant and especially trying to engage those citizens that feel alienated by the traditional consultation processes or local democracy in general.
We are looking into new ways researchers and students get down on to the streets and engage with local people. We are developing the City Agency bringing a mix of qualitative, quantitative and spatial methods into local communities involving both students, researchers, local stakeholders and local media. We want educational institutions to play a role in promoting local stewardship in a way where both the local community and students and researchers benefit.
A City Agency would be part of a emerging network of City Agencies that are mainly based in Architecture Schools in Europe – so far in Sheffield, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, Stockholm
CiTyBee Workshop
We have during the years – also back with Supertanker – developed workshop formats that would give students a hands on experience in a local community while at the same time that community would benefit from the ideas and actions of the students.
Our goal is to develop open ended, interactive skills for the individuation of urban issues. With focus on the active involvement of locals through spatial and visible interactions. The workshop has a flexible format and can be stretched from the intensive 2 weeks that is described in the presentation to a longer period of time.
Read the presentation here
See photos from our last workshop with danish students here
See the movie the students made to present the workshop here
Read the Zine that the students published here
Visit from Sheffield
Friday february 22nd was spent in good company with 26 students from Sheffield School of Architecture. Instead of a presentation that showed our work in Hedehusene we involved them in a live presentation of CiTyBee.
In just 2 hours we went through all 3 phases: telling the stories about the spaces; engaging in a dialogue with the aim of identifying the most important of these stories; and acting on the outcomes of the dialogue to answer the brief of the day – How to make the station in Hedehusene more visible.
The result was impressive and played well into the activities in the afternoon when we held an open house for the local community to come and share their thoughts and ideas.
Zines
In late 2012 we started to publish “Zines” – publications that can be produced cheap and fast. Just like building on the spot, “Zines” can be used as effective tools to making the dialogue about space more concrete and visible. We want to start producing “Zines” much earlier in the process – rather than producing long reports, like we did in 2012, that often go unread.
In this case we produced two issues of a new local magazine – Hovedgaden (The Main Street), edited and produced by local people with the help of some students. Instead of stapling we got an old sewing machine and sewed them together.
Phase 3: Offshoots
In the third phase we facilitated concrete actions based on the new localised ideas and networks. In this case the idea was to make an incubator for local projects in the empty train station. One of our actions was to design and build a module for the old train station that had a number functions.
A bench
A table
A stage
Our idea was that the flexibility of this design makes it less finished and more open for new ideas and discussions.
We did some practical things that made the Station function better like building a common storage
Some local musicians passed by and noticed the bad acoustics in the biggest room in the station – it used to be the waiting area. We made a large acoustic curtain that improved the discussion “climate” in the building.
We tried out a number of ways to use the building with local people; a cinema evening
Eating together
DJ Dr Jazz pLayed some of his records. This was also a test of the new acoustic curtain to see if it improved the possibility to play music there. It did.
Finally we organised a number of public meetings that discussed the use of the building so far.
As a result of the meeting and the prototyping before that, the building is slowly coming alive with a formal association, a local theatre group setting up their plays and more music arrangements.See all the photos here
In the third phase we also worked with the langauge that is used to talk about the local community. In our case we discovered the word offshoots which was used to describe a number of actions in the community like:
The many additions to the self build houses or how you move into an existing old factory building.
A new curated walk was organised to discuss the offshoots in the community and formalising the use of that word. We also choose to use the word offshoots to describe the third phase in the CiTyBee process:
Concrete spatial actions: either building and taking space in a visual and functional way but also changing the way we talk about space. Offshoots are ongoing changes to what is already there. Always leaving little seeds of imperfection that makes it open to new stories, discussions and offshoots.
Urban Process Design
For a number of years Supertanker has organised a workshop for 1st year Students at the University of Roskilde. The workshop tries to include a number of elements into an intensive 2 weeks: Sensing, talking and taking space, from appropriation of their own space (here the old train station in Hedehusene) to spatial interventions in public space.
We also started (again) to work with mapping using technology. In this case we let the students use Twitter and a mashup with bing maps
Hedemarkedet and DIT
The wish to make a local market has been strong in Hedehusene for years but an art project that didn’t really have a market as its objective made local people meet and discuss the future of the town. Hedehusene has been loosing shops from the main street for years and the market thus fulfils a strong local wish for a more lively city.
Locally produced honey
Local music
At the opening the local mayor engaged in a fight with kids from a local roleplaying club.
When we started our CiTyBee “prototype” it was obvious to do that on the first market day in 2012.
A year after the opening of the market Supertanker made a “Do It Together – DIT” action there where we tried to design and build a prototype for a market stall “in and for public space”. This short movie documents the action and was used as our contribution to a conference “Urban Platform” organised by Citymine(d) in Brussels.
citybee.dk 