sustainability

The power of networking: building resilient neighborhoods

This past weekend, the Sustainable Favela Network (SFN) – a project led by Brazilian NGO Catalytic Communities (CatComm) – hosted its first international exchange online event. During the event grassroots leaders and activists shared their work and efforts to develop community-based initiatives that strengthen environmental sustainability and social resilience in informal settlements and underinvested communities worldwide. Most tackled some of the biggest challenges that our society faces, such as reducing poverty, providing accessible education, promoting gender equality and climate actions.

In a world where many communities have often been treated as illegitimate by their governments and excluded from discussions and debates about the plans for the future of their cities, this knowledge-sharing experience highlighted some of the innovative strategies that have been helping residents of informal settlements not only to imagine, plan and build their own future but also to claim a meaningful role in creating a city that embraces them and recognizes their rights.

Listed here are some of these astonishing projects. If you are as passionate as I am about participatory design processes, I am sure they will be a great source of inspiration. Check them out!

1.       The favela Museum – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

2.       The Human City Project / Chicoco Radio - Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

3.       The Point CDC  - Bronx, New York, USA.

Urban Tinkering: The Innovative and Sustainable Approach for Broken Spaces

Common urban issues we face today revolve around the effects of environmental changes. While this problem has been longing, the extent to which it will improve or worsen depends on cities impending actions.

In 2018, a group of researchers put forward the propounding concept of Urban Tinkering, which aims to answer social, economic, and ecological demands through sustainable development and redevelopment of urban amenities. Urban tinkering is a transformative approach in tackling environmental planning, engineering, and managing of the urban environment. The idea steers to adapt, alter, and repurpose dysfunctional structures into more practical and beneficial uses for the society.

“Urban Tinkering can function by promoting a diversity of small-scale urban experiments that, in aggregate, lead to large-scale often playful innovative solutions to the problems of sustainable development” (Elmqvist, Thomas, et al., pp.1., 2018).

The concept reinforces the currently lacking bridge between crucial experts in development, including planners, engineers, architects, ecologists, and others. As a result, urban tinkering has supplemented and enhanced traditional development through its unpredictability, flexibility, and multi-faceted approaches. Essentially, adopting this attitude in planning and design would be valuable as it brings advantages to the environment as well as citizens’ welfare.

References

Elmqvist, T., Siri, J., Andersson, E., Anderson, P., Bai, X., Das, P. K., Gatere, T., Gonzalez, A., Goodness,

J., Handel, S. N., Hermansson Török, E., Kavonic, J., Kronenberg, J., Lindgren, E., Maddox, D., Maher, R., Mbow, C., McPhearson, T., Mulligan, J., Nordenson, G., Spires, M., Stenkula, U., Takeuchi, K., Vogel, C. (2018). Urban tinkering. Sustainability Science, 13(6), 1549–1564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0611-0

Cities by Citizens: From Planning to Citymaking

'Where is planning in all this?' was a recurrent question I received when I presented my  research on the square movements of 2011, 2012 and 2013 in urban studies, geography and planning conference. The occupations of Tahrir Square, Plaza del Sol and Catalunya in Spain, Zuccotti Park in New York, and Taksim Square in Istambul developed open libraries, kitchens that fed thousands every day, community gardens, art workshops and film screenings. They hosted open-to-the-public assemblies, teach-ins and open conversations to discuss the economy, gender, social change, the environment and the media. They cooked with solar stoves, built structures with recycled wooden skids and used bicycle-powered sound systems in their general assemblies. Here, it is difficult to recognize a hierarchical order but it's impossible not recognizing planning. However, the experience of the protest encampments makes us reconsider planning and think more about citymaking as a broad process of design, use, regulation, interpretation, representation, imagination and, of course, urban planning. The experiment of the square movement has passed. But the impetus to create citizen-driven, citizen-led and citizen-responsive cities is very much alive.