Dream Your City - 2012 Architecture Biennale Venice
a global creative set of new tools to rethink and transform local urban life.
In order to exemplify the philosophy and potential of the Dream Your City, the exhibit displayed aspects of our DREAMHAMAR project in Hamar, Norway.
The exhibition included a re-creation of the pattern that was painted on the main square in Hamar by the art collective Boa Mistura, a video wall showing some of the urban actions and workshops that took place, and images of some of the objects/tools that were used to promote engagement in the community. The exhibition incorporated a trampoline, as a recreation of the action playhamar which placed one one in the middle of Stortorget.
Manifesto of the exhibition:
As architects and urban designers who approach the city as a complex and multi-layered phenomenon, we realized that in recent years a deep transformation had occurred in the way architects interact with city-related issues.
Ecosistema Urbano is working on the research and development of tools that provide new opportunities for interaction and participation, enhancing creativity and incorporating new technologies so that different groups can participate in different ways.
In our practice we have learned – by doing – that knowledge and creation are becoming hybrid and widespread phenomena which are transforming traditional, closed and fixed structures into open and extremely flexible networked configurations.
Knowledge, creation, learning, society, culture, urban and architectural design: all these fields are getting closer to a network structure.
This trend of high connectivity network creation and complex dynamics is an intrinsic feature of today’s world, and we believe that this model is revealing itself to be more suitable and efficient, particularly when it comes to innovation. It also creates a new field of research and study that we have named ‘network thinking’ and defined as a network approach to the creation, design and development of projects, ideas, and strategies.
We believe that the only way to engage in networked urban design is to incorporate citizens’ wishes and stimulate them to become active agents in the process, rather than passive recipients of the final product. We believe in the inner creativity of individuals, and in the power of collectivity. A new design for public space can provide a unique opportunity to empower citizens and plant the seed for a collectively envisioned future.
By defining spaces or platforms to support interaction and experimentation, Dream your City aims to inspire cities worldwide in the creation of new means of collective communication and interaction for rethinking and transforming urban life.
