Idea Camp 2015: Meet the 25 #RDgrantees and their ideas

Bostan: A Garden for All

Merve’s idea is about empowering refugees – together with locals, through culture, collective action and solidarity. The aim is to develop a kitchen and orchard made by refugees and locals, in South East Turkey. This will ultimately create a vocational education environment and socio-economical value for refugees.

Principles for Urban Commons

Throughout Europe we are witnessing a blossoming of the practice of commoning in the urban environment: transformations of urban space through temporary and permanent civic interventions. Sophie aims to develop set strategies and legal tools to protect the social value created by commoning projects, focussing her research particularly on Amsterdam and Berlin.

QX1 – Migrant community docking pilot

Frederic believes that experience sharing and collective action will help migrants facing the helplessness and confusion generated by a heavy and complex bureaucracy. His idea is to create a participative information-sharing platform, in multiple languages, based on migrants needs and experiences.

Botanic Concrete

Botanic Concrete’ (BC) will provide a learning platform where people will be able to ‘Build the city’ by producing a new urban knowledge, one based on the heterogenous profiles, skills and imaginations of the participants.

Summer Cinema in Open Air

Nicolai will be working on the re-development of an unused open air cinema in Chisinau which will act as a hub where local citizens, especially young people, can come together to discuss the future and talk about issues that affect the community. The aim is to strengthen the spirit of the community and engage more citizens in local activism and building their city together.

Access to affordable public housing poses a huge challenge in Belgrade. Traditional financial mechanisms do not meet the needs of a wide section of the urban population to finance their homes. This research will explore how proven approaches such as community bonds and local exchange schemes can combine with new cryptocurrencies to support community housing.

The Ageless City: Intergenerational Spaces for Culturally Diverse Neighbourhoods in Europe

Taking Lefebvre’s idea of lived space as its starting point, this proposal aims at bringing together younger and senior residents of ethnically diverse communities in two European cities – Mouraria in Lisbon and Butetown in Cardiff. They will be invited into communities of practice and learning where they can use their ‘multiple intelligences’ to reflect on ways to improve the appropriation of public space and the preservation of cultural heritage.

GRRR

Grrr is a strategy that connects supply ad demand between self-managed urban projects and public and private companies and institutions for the management and re-use of physical resources such as construction materials. The project will take the form of a set of protocols, agreements, and manuals, and a digital tool that will visualise supply and demand, manage and monitor resources and calculate the resulting environmental impact.

Rolling Knowledge

‘Rolling knowledge’ is a mobile school/laboratory of applied skills for life, art, handcraft and management for people of every age and education level living in rural areas. Dzmitry will bring people together in workshops and cultural activities that they will organise themselves so they can develop local communities and protect local cultural traditions in pottery/ceramics, knitting, folk-singing and so on.

New Life of Old Buildings

Tamar’s idea aims to expand the cultural centre of the city to the marginalised parts, which have many unused spaces and abandoned buildings. She wants to transform these buildings into cultural spaces that will contribute to the sustainable development of the community and diversify the life of the neighbourhoods.

City Castles/Invisible Shadows

This idea is based on the need for new spaces for young artists and creatives together with the number of abandoned/unused buildings in Port Said, Egypt. The project aims to explore the possibilities of revitalising these unused buildings through artistic and cultural activities.

Young curators to heal a neighbourhood

The idea is to empower local young people by helping them to become curators of cultural events in their own neighbourhoods. Juan will undertake research, learning from a range of other international projects, to develop a toolkit and guidance so that the ‘autobarrios’ methodology an be adopted in other European cities.

PlataForma: power to the makers

With the belief that citizens need non-institutional spaces to gather and breed new models for alternative solutions, Plataforma proposes to convert Trafaria’s old abandoned prison into a lab for European creative communities.

Civic Managed Areas

Public infrastructure can be used more effectively when there is a vision and social capital involved. Wojtek’s research will study existing ‘community-managed areas’ (CMA) and develop a model to help these projects unleash their full potential.

Caring IN the city

Silvia’s project aims to redefine and re-invent the neighbourhood to make it more welcoming and child-friendly, a place where a community-based upbringing can be a reality. It also aims to create a learning community that will be in charge of carrying out the research and the creative process.

Welcome to The Living Room!

Laura’s idea is to allow migrants and refugees to tell their stories in improvised public ‘living rooms’, using a mix of artistic and narrative forms, so that local audiences can hear about their experiences and learn more about the problems they face. This cultural exchange is designed to increase cohesion and reduce mistrust and alienation in communities where refugees and migrants are settled.

Permanent space, temporary city

Insight City is a pilot project for crowdsourcing ideas from local citizens for the improvement of their local communities in Romania. Irina aims to show through this prototype that this method of working directly with citizens can solve local problems effectively.

Design Build/Refugeecamp “Alte Ziegelei” Mainz

The refugee crisis has put great pressure on housing and led to the construction of many ad-hoc and temporary camps. Laura’s idea will explore the opportunities for communities to develop affordable, sustainable housing solutions through collective work and sharing or knowledge and resources.

The Ekenäs Story Caravan

The Story Caravan is a mobile studio which will tell the stories of local citizens in a variety of formats, including audio and video. It is a place-making project designed to deepen local engagement, place identity and develop alternative methods for democratic dialogue between community members. Ylva will collect the stories, edit them and into podcasts and publish them online with an interactive map.

SPACES FOR ARTS, WELFARE AND PROGRESS (SAWP)

Mohab’s R&D work will map abandoned spaces in Alexandria, help local young people to become guides and offer ‘Culture Walks’ to visitors, and in the longer term equip women in the community with the skills to manage these spaces as local cultural venues.

Atlas of Urban Commons Charters

Frederic’s idea is to map the legal charters and frameworks that underpin many of the urban commons initiatives across Southern Europe and develop a catalog of tools and methods to co-produce and support practices of governance of urban commons.

Network the school!

Zuzana’s idea is to make the (often unused) resources of local schools available to citizens outside teaching hours and to allow residents to use their skills and abilities to improve the neighbourhood. The project aims to be a model for education professionals interested in making their institutions play a more active role within their local communities.

Changing the delivery mechanism for physical regeneration is vital in fostering long term resilience in communities. Steve’s project – The Urban Workbench – will be a hub for communities looking to do repairs and self build projects. Citizens will learn building skills and lost crafts and assist one another in takingg control of building their neighbourhoods.

Social Production of Habitat: Towards a European platform

The quantitative and qualitative housing crisis in Europe is an urgent problem, not only in fast-growing cities, but also in shrinking cities with depleted housing stock. Bea will build a map of community housing initiatives across Europe and facilitate knowledge exchange between them by developing a Digital Social Platform.

Yemek Hikaye

Through this R&D process, Su will create a resource space for stories about collective urban gardening projects in a variety of formats (e.g. text, video, photo, infographics), under various themes (e.g. self-sustenance, clean soil, food safety), highlighting various emergencies. The resource space will be fed and disseminated via a range of online and offline activities.