CreSITE

cITy aS

commonS

Co-organized by the City of Prague Institute for Planning and Development (IPR) in cooperation with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Czech Republic

Shared City

International workshop: outcomes

reSITE and co-organizer, the City of Prague Institute for Planning and Development (IPR), in cooperation with the Kingdom of the Embassy of the Netherlands in the Czech Republic hosted a free day-long program consisting of a public workshop, public lecture and public evening discussion salon for designers, city creative strategy planners or researchers involved and interested in the collaborative economy and citizen participation to map current creative research, activities and projects related to relevant social and urban developments, and to build a network for future collaboration. The “Users as Designers” method is empowering people to make and understand products and processes, for more transparency. This event was one of three events to precede reSITE 2016 Conference and Festival in June 2016, which brings together a wider community of practitioners to explore ways in which we share the city relative to public architecture and public space.

The events expanded upon the theme of the “Shared City” which was pioneered at reSITE 2015 in June. The “City as Commons” lecture, workshop and salon discussion established a forum for discussing practices, theories and methods for continuing to study new approaches and frameworks for citizen engagement in urban planning and city development with a focus on new technologies to negotiate the divide between communities, developers and municipal agencies and authorities. The topic studies and presents the collaborative economy’ in the broadest sense of the term (see, for example reSITE 2015: Shared City), with researchers and practitioners contributing from a diverse range of disciplines spanning architecture, design, citizen participation, urban planning, the sharing economy, open data, shared consumption, makers movement, P2P finance, distributed and collaborative governance and block-chain applications.

There is a growing need for cooperation across sectors, especially between the public and private sector with community input. Some models of public engagement that worked in the pre-2008 economic climate are dated or nonexistent and new technologies have made it possible for broader forms of communicating with the public about urban development. However, few governments and municipalities have acted simply because they don’t have the tools. All of the City as Commons events will discuss the new tools available and how cities like Bristol (UK) and Amsterdam (NL) are utilizing the digital tools to create a civic commons.

International workshop

Public-private cooperation in the 21st century should utilize digital tools to create a commons for public life and public participation. This event aimed to explain how.

December 11th 2015

Workshop: 14:00 - 16:30Reception: 16:00 - 17:00

Architects’ Hall (4th Floor), Old Town HallStaroměstské náměstí 1/3, Prague 1

Workshop led by: Mara Balestrini (Ideas for Change - Barcelona) Frank Kresin (Waag Society / Institute for Art, Science and Technology - Amsterdam)

The CiTy as Commons

Definition of the “Urban Commons”

“…the goods - tangible, intangible and digital - that citizens and the Administration - through participative and deliberative procedures, recognize to be functional to the individual and collective wellbeing, activating consequently towards them, to share the responsibility with the Administration of their care or regeneration in order to improve the collective enjoyment.”

- Bologna Regulation on Public Collaboration for Urban Commons

The “urban commons” might also describe ‘shared management’ of both public and private spaces in the city.

Above: workshop assignments. Below: Mara Balestrini and Martin Barry (reSITE founder & director)

Below: workshop participants filling out “Prague News 2020”

Above: Mara Balestrini (Ideas for Change) talking about the Commons

Below: Tomáš Rákos CEO, Democracy 2.1) reading the “Prague News 2020”

- what are the commons and what are the technologies enabling citizen engagement, mapping, sensing, sharing, making and funding

- what are the active organizations in Prague that have the potential to cooperate with each other and the city

- what are the main problems of Prague from the perspective of workshop participants- what are the potential strategies how to address these problems with common resources

and collaborative work- what are the potential tools of collaboration

administration / participation:1. low interest in public space, low

citizen participation rate and low number of initiatives

2. lack of public trust towards authorities

3. lack of engagement of municipalities

4. lack of political continuity and follow-up action

mobility:

5. magistrala” thoroughfare cutting through the very city center and “Vltavska” crossing

6. too many barriers for pedestrians (including ugly red-white fences)

7. inconveniently short signals at pedestrian crossings

8. no continuous bicycle lane along the river (missing link between “Manes” and “Staromestska”)

administration / participation visions:

1. A Great Number of Community Projects Were Submitted to the City. High Participation Rate in a Call.

2. Prague City Centre: From NIMBY (Never in My Backyard) to WTBMBY (Want to Be in My Backyard).

mobility visions:

3. “Magistrala” - The Most Popular Place for Residents! Prague Residents Voted Last Week for the Prague’s Most Attractive Public Space.

4. From the Traffic Terror to the Relax Zone. Museum Got Rid of the Magistrala - People Can Have a Picnic in Front of the National Museum.

5. Prague Opens New 3 KM Linear Park in City Centre. City Turns Major Highway Into Pedestrian and Ecological Park Making Crossing the City Much Safer for Pedestrians

6. Prague’s Public Transportation Awarded for User Satisfaction. After Wi-Fi Coverage Reached 100% Two Years Ago, More Innovations Were Implemented.

7. Pedestrian Crossings Made Safer by Prolonging The Green Signals at Zebras.

Outcomes Outcomes

What we have learned

Outlined issues of Prague

Vision of Prague 2020

social, economical and living environment:

9. missing free wifi coverage in public space and public transit

10. costly city center with no housing offer

11. river too dirty to swim in12. no interest in suburbs13. too much advertisement in public

space

social, economical and living environment visions:

8. Resorts in Mediterranean Go Broke! Tourists Enjoy Summer Vacation on Vltava! Revolutionized Vltava Riverbank Secured Prague City Hall Biggest Tourist Income in Centuries.

We have collaboratively formulated 8 visions for Prague (Prague News 2020):

We have outlined 13 issues in Prague (relative to the physical commons) that were identified during the ‘City as Commons’ workshop:

Above: workshop assignments. Below: Mara Balestrini and Martin Barry (reSITE founder & director)Above: Zdenek Lance (Vodafone Rok Jinak winner 2016)

Below: Frank Kresin & The Ambassador of The Kindgdom of The Netherlands in Prague

“Prague News 2020” was a creative task assigned to all workshop participants: imagine

the headline for Prague newspaper in 2020. What kind of change do you anticipate? How

did it all start? Who made it possible?

Mara Balestrini (@marabales) is a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) expert and technology strategist. She has a track record of successful independent technology interventions for bottom-up citizen engagement. Mara is a partner and Director of Research at Ideas for change, a think tank and consultancy firm advising cities, businesses and institutions on innovation, open and collaborative strategies, citizen participation, and exponential growth. Most recently, she has led efforts in collaboration with KWMC and Bristol City Council to develop “The Bristol approach”, a commons-based framework for participatory urbanism. Mara is a PhD candidate at the Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities (ICRI-Cities) at University College London (UCL). Her research focuses on studying the factors associated to the scalability and sustainability of community technology interventions. She is also a member of the UCL Engineering Exchange, guest faculty at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, contributor to the Sharing Cities Network, and co-organiser of the Ouishare Collaborative Economy Research Network.

Frank Kresin (@kresin) is interested in creative technology for social innovation - and life in general.

Frank Kresin is Research Director at Waag Society, responsible for the research programme and chairman of the Management Team. The research programme consists of six research themes, aimed at healthcare, education, culture, society, the government and the business world. Frank has a background as filmmaker and holds a masters degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Amsterdam. He has worked as a programme manager at the Dutch Digital University Consortium, and filmmaker functional designer at the University of Amsterdam. He is a board member for ISOC NL and The Mobile City, and currently serves in the steering committees of Erfgoed & Locatie (Heritage & Location) and CineGrid Amsterdam.

As of 2006, he leads the programme group of Waag Society, that develops new projects and initiatives, where consortia are formed and financing is secured. He stood at the start of many projects of Waag Society as well as others and is concerned with themes like Creative Care, Future Internet, Open design and Open Data. Among the projects he (co-)founded are CineGrid Amsterdam, Apps for Amsterdam, Nederland Opent Data, Kies op Maat and Geheugen van Almere. Frank regularly presents and writes on transdisciplinary research in the creative industry.

Future Leaders

MARA BALESTRINI FRANK KRESIN

Ideas for Change WAAG SocietyWe have collaboratively proposed 10

factors to make these visions for Prague possible (Prague News 2020):

1. Active citizens, NGOs, citizen’s initiatives

2. Engaged citizens organized by social and technological networks in collaboration with politicians (boroughs, districts, city hall)

3. Mayor understanding the importance of engaging communities

4. Prague Institute of Planning and Development

5. Sustainable policy6. Data analytics7. Info-campaign based on data8. Best practice from other cities

(Vienna)9. Private property owners10. Architects

In order to crowdsource solutions and resources to tackle the above outlined challenges we would like to organize a follow-up workshop in 2016 with more targeted goals to identify potentials, instruments and funding for tapping the Prague Urban Commons (PUC). Your input is really essential to get the most out of the second round!

reSITE would like to organize a follow-up workshop with more details and more indept work / participation as part of a larger event on the Shared City. We hope to do such an event in September 2016. If you have not yet been able to provide feedback for the December 2015 workshop, please do so. We hope to improve the event by adding more time and have a more focused agenda for the outputs. However, we do reiterate that the December event was an introduction to the topic and the theme of the shared city and commons.

In order to keep the conversation about the Commons going, we have reached out to you and asked how you can help.

impact hub Prague, Brno and ostrava has offered to provide space for events at a rate that covers just their costs. impact hub can help with financing (social loans) through social impact Banking at Ceska sporitelna for potential social entreprises. Petr Vitek (impact hub) has also offered to provide some of his time on any future initiaives if it would help. it would!

Let’s work together and with groups like Ideas for Change, WAAG Society, reSITE IPR and Impact Hub to make it real.

Next step - Urban CommonsWho & what will make it possible

Martin is a landscape architect, and the Founder and Chairman of reSITE. At reSITE, Martin leads the team with strategy, fundraising and overall goals while providing creative and program direction for current and future reSITE projects. As a former Associate at W Architecture in New York City where he worked 8 years, Martin led multi-disciplinary teams on complex landscape projects all over the globe, collaborating on urban waterfronts, parks, plazas and universities in the United States, Saudi Arabia, China, United Arab Emirates, Haiti, Canada, Europe and Mexico. With degrees in history, business, and landscape architecture, and spending his younger years training in various construction trades he is uniquely positioned to understand and manage the disparate forces on complex projects. Because of this diverse background, he is adept at negotiating the distinct and often competing perspectives between municipalities, architects, investors, cultural needs and communities. Martin is a Fulbright Scholar, and it was during his fellowship in the Czech Republic when he dreamed-up the idea to start reSITE. He is also a Fellow with the Design Trust for Public Space and is a Registered Landscape Architect in the United States who lectures about landscape architecture, urban design and collaboration at conferences and universities in the United States, Europe and Asia. Above all, he is committed to a human-centered design approach that focuses on quality urban investments that simultaneously benefit ecology, economy and culture for the next generation of urban dwellers.

Architect, program director of reSITE international festival and conference on more livable cities, lecturer at ARCHIP / Architectural Institute in Prague. 2014 New Europe 100 outstanding challenger from Central and Eastern Europe - by Res Publica with Google and the Visegrad Fund in cooperation with Financial Times. Lectured at universitites and institutes in USA, Japan, Thailand, Germany, Austria, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine and Czech Republic. In 2005-2012 Editor-in-Chief of professional architecture magazine ERA21, from 2013 it’s scientific supervisor. Official nominator of European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Award - for the Czech Republic, expert advisor of Metropolitan Sounding Board of Prague City Council in the issues of urban development, member of Commission for urban development and architecture in Prague 7 district, official certifier of Register of Artistic Outputs of Czech Universities for the segment of Architecture. Graduate from Faculty of Architecture CTU Prague (2000) and Academy of Fine Arts in Prague - conceptual arts (2003). Studied at ENSA Nantes, France. Lives in Prague.

Moderators Participants

MARTIN BARRY OSAMU OKAMURA

reSITE reSITE

Jaroslav Anděl Independent curator

Eliška BradováSecretary, Spatial Information SectionIPR Prague

Lenka BurgerováCouncilorPraha 7

Eva ČervinkováArchitect, Urban Design SectionIPR Prague

Blanka HavlíčkováCo-founderZdrojovna.cz

Petr HlaváčekDirectorIPR

Jakub HradilekCoordinatorZažít město jinak

Daniella HuszárKÉK

Dominik JandlPolitical AnalystDemocracy 2.1

Vítek JežekProject CoordinatorRekola

Ondřej KobzaFounderPiána na uliciCafé Neustadt

Zuzana KuldováArchitect, Urban Design SectionIPR Prague

Zdeněk LancHead of Design and Development of New MediaCzech TV

Martina MacákováInternational Relations Specialist, Communication and Participation SectionIPR Prague

David OndráčkaDirectorTransparency International

Petr PeřinkaStrategy and Development Specialist, Strategy and Policy SectionIPR Prague

Tomáš RákosCEODemocracy 2.1

Michaela RybičkováProject CoordinatorNášStátFond Otakara Motejla

Jiří SulženkoProgram Director,Depo 2015, Pilsen 2015

Adam ŠvejdaHead of Communication and Participation SectionIPR Prague

Erik VaněkPřístupnější stát

Kateřina VídenováCo-founderLetná sobě!councilorPraha 7

Petr VítekCo-founderImpact Hub

Ondřej ZapletalEducation Program Designer, Social Impact Bank at Ceska Sporitelna

When: 26/11, 18:00-19:00Where: CCEA Lobby, Karoliny Světlé 31, Prague 1Participants: general public

When: 26/11, 21:00-22:00Where: The Maharal Club at the Emblem Hotel (Basement Floor), Platnéřská 19, Prague 1Participants: general public

Historically, the city has been regarded as a space filled with opportunities. This assumption is based on three phenomena that are profoundly urban: cities attract a critical mass of people and resources, they provide spaces for the emergence of fortuitous encounters between strangers, and they offer a wide range of infrastructures. In this seminar we were discussing how new technologies, citizen-driven collaborative modes of production, and open licenses can generate new infrastructure in cities and with them new opportunities for their inhabitants. We have had identified different types of technologies that have enabled new forms of participation and resulted in the development of commons (e.g. Wikipedia, Safecast, Creative Commons, Guifi.net): from mapping to sensing, sharing, making and funding. How are these tools being appropriated at the grassroots level to effect positive change? What can we learn from previous experiences in this subject? What’s the role of public and private institutions in a context of commons-based peer production? By discussing different case studies that reveal how citizens are harnessing the potential of digital technologies to collectively transform their environments we aim to inspire novel initiatives to rethink Prague from the bottom-up.

Recently, global economic turmoil has led to the rise of many grassroots movements and communities that share a strong sustainable design agenda and the desire for political, economic and societal change starting in cities. There is a growing need for cooperation across sectors, especially between the public and private sector with community input. Some models of public engagement that worked in the pre-2008 economic climate are dated or non-existent and new technologies have made it possible for broader forms of communicating with the public about urban development. However, few governments and municipalities have acted simply because they don’t have the tools. This salon have discussed the new tools available and how cities like Bristol, England are utilizing the digital tools to create a civic commons.

Public events

LECTURE: CITY AS COMMONS WITH MARA BALESTRINI AND FRANK KRESIN

SALON DISCUSSION: CITY AS COMMONS WITH MARA BALESTRINI AND FRANK KRESIN, MODERATED BY VIT JEZEK

15:30-16:15

PART 2: IMAGINING THE COMMONS

Above: Frank Kresin Below: Mara Balestrini giving a public lecture in Prague Above: crowd socializing after the lecture. Below: Mara Balestrini giving her presentation

City of PragueThe Prague city plan determines where and

what will be built in the capital but it also

states where a building restriction applies,

or which location is reserved for future

constructions of public interest. Prague is

the fifteenth-largest city in the European

Union. Situated in the north-west of the

country on the Vltava River, the city is

home to about 1.24 million people, while

its larger urban zone is estimated to have

a population of nearly 2 million. Prague

is classified as an “Alpha-” global city

according to GaWC studies, comparable to

Vienna, Seoul and Washington, D.C. Prague

is the fifth most visited European city after

London, Paris, Istanbul and Rome.

The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Czech RepublicThe work of the Netherlands Embassy in Prague focuses on the political, cultural and economic relations between the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. The embassy also helps Dutch citizens with the consular queries and assists them in case of emergencies in the Czech Republic. The aim of the embassy is also to provide the public with important and interesting information, both on the Netherlands and on the activities of the embassy; visit czechrepublic.nlembassy.org

The most recent information, including facts, figures and fun are published via the Facebook page www.facebook.com/AmbassadePraag. In the first half of 2016 the Netherlands will hold the Presidency of the Council of the European Union for the 12th time. Find the latest on the Dutch Presidency via EU2016.nl

Prague Institute of Planning And Development

(IPR Prague)The Prague Institute of Planning and

Development (IPR Prague) is a contributory

organisation established by the City of

Prague. IPR Prague is the city’s main

conceptual workplace in the area of

architecture, urbanism, development

and city building, and it cooperates on

significant decisions in these areas. New

approach of IPR Prague is an example

of the city’s new approach, the goal of

which is smart, realistic and conceptual

planning and administration of the city in

accordance with the Smart City concept.

reSITEreSITE is an international and collaborative platform to exchange ideas about making

cities more livable, competitive and resilient. reSITE Festival and Conference highlights

how contemporary, collaborative design can improve life in cities. We organize workshops,

design competitions, international conferences and a public festival with urban games,

films, bike rides, discussions & public space interventions. Experts at reSITE Conference

discuss inspiring urban projects from world-class cities to exhibit how effective municipal

leaders and financiers commissioned leading architects while working with citizens to

improve their cities not just for today, but for generations to come. reSITE is exploring the

real economic, social and ecological value that smarter design adds to cities. We focus

on processes and solutions of people-centered cities. We promote collaboration amongst

diverse experts and are focused on innovative ways to find a balance of power between

top-down and bottom-up decision making.

Organizers Organizers

10 goals of reSITE

Identify hurdles to proper

21st century urban

planning and economic

development in the Czech

Republic

Be a catalyst for public and

private action

Engage the public in

urban events, increasing

sensitivity to urban

environments

Host international

design competitions that

encourage diverse teams

to challenge the status quo

in public space design

Make urban design cool

Increase awareness of

international standards for

urban design and planning

Advocate for institutional

change in Czech planning

and development

Highlight visionary

leadership that fosters

creative, economically

viable solutions

Encourage collaboration

between design disciplines

Bridge the gap between

designers, NGOs, municipal

leaders, developers /

investors

Upcoming eventsMarch 2016“Win-Win: Private-Public-Civic Partnerships in the 21st century” event with IPR at the UN Habitat III European Regional Meeting in Prague

June 16-18 2016

reSITE Conference & Festival

Forum Karlin, Prague

reSITEwww.resite.cz

www.praha.eu

czechrepublic.nlembassy.org

www.iprpraha.cz