We invited back last month’s What If… guest columnists, Connect the Dots, to highlight more ground-up initiatives from abroad.
Over the last ten years or so we have started to give this phenomenon its name – the kind of micro activism that springs up in neighbourhoods or within certain communities that responds to the challenges of urban life. Take, for example, the Civic Systems Lab and R-Urban in London – groups that provide the platform and the space for the offshoots of a participatory city to grow.
R-Urban is a bottom-up strategy exploring the possibilities of enhancing urban resiliency by introducing a network of resident-run facilities between key fields of activity such as economy, housing, urban agriculture and culture. They test out tools for citizen engagement in both London and Collobes, France. R-Urban have four main projects: an agricultural unit, a grow-your-own space, a recycling lab, and a co-operative. Last year they were developing a way to create bio-gas to use as fuel for cooking from the food waste of a café. As well as this they have a bike-fixing workshop and bike storage – the apartments that were built across from the Olympic Park (where they have located themselves in an empty lot) were not designed with bicycle owners in mind.
While R-Urban focuses on the nuts and bolts of minimal impact living – the Civic Systems Lab drums to a similar beat. Lambeth Council and Civic Systems Lab formed The Open Works, honing in on one area and coming up with multiple ways to showcase useful tools such as grassroots initiatives and urban interventions for social cohesion and sustainable urban living.
The key take away from this project in particular was this: If you can negotiate with local government and convince them of the value of co-creation and participation in urban planning, the results will affect all aspects of our daily lives. It also suggests that everyone does want to be part of this process, they just haven’t been given the opportunity to do so.
On the theme of participation, the Community Lover’s Guide (communityloversguide.org), a resource that brings together all sorts of collaborative and inspiring projects as well as the Open Works project, stand as beacons and further complement the work done by R-Urban and their daily acts of participation. However, one thing is certain, in both cases, their infectious sense of hope and optimism for the way we live in cities is constantly under threat from the looming high-rise buildings around it, the potential plans to tarmac over spaces for carparks, and the precarious business models that keep the ideas small in scale and moderate in reach. With a mayfly life expectancy, these projects at best create necessary cracks and fissures in the status quo systems in place, and at worst slip by largely unnoticed.
The Grow Dome Project (fb.com/thegrowdomeproject) in Dublin 8 is a similar example and following the same vein of R-Urban. Their business plan will allow one community representative to monitor the growth and then sale of lettuce with minimal time and energy so that they can spend their energy on community growth instead. They have created a space for classes, workshops, a place to gather for rest or play – that can also function, once scaled, as a way of paying one person to look after the community in a much more effective way. The basic principles: If we are not given space, we will make it for ourselves, if we are not given sustainable energy, we will find a way to create it.
Bloom Fringe Festival is reminiscent in some ways to Civic Systems Lab – in that the June Bank Holiday weekend festival aims to celebrate the grassroots initiatives, the urban interventions, the pop-up happenings that make Dublin what it is. Dublin, however, needs something like Civic Systems Lab to measure the impact, prove their value, and support their continued growth.
On the afternoon of Saturday 4th June Connect the Dots and Bloom Fringe Festival are hosting a Your City Your Dublin picnic in the Dubh Linn Garden, Dublin Castle at 1.30pm. It will be an afternoon of brainstorming ideas and connecting with people and groups that have an interest in all things related to greening the city and sustainable living solutions for our city.
Words: Connect the Dots
