Community Labs?
In fields of business, politics and design unfamiliar partnerships focused on the necessity of radical urban change seem to be occurring. These collaborations are focused on sustainable innovation among communities of different types of users. Local neighborhood strategies are enriched with experiences from elsewhere on the globe. Industrial research organizations are trying to mobilize knowledge from across the globe to innovate better and faster. Municipalities are trying to stimulate neighborhoods and their industrial base.
The incentive of these experimental collaborations, which could perhaps be referred to as ‘community labs’ is a refreshing type of culture of engagement: a process–oriented collaboration, with an open type of communication, which is not necessary end-goal driven, yet focused on sharing knowledge in order to improve.
This type of engagement can be observed among artists and architects. It is emerging out of a sense of urgency and seeks to exploit the opportunity for a new kind of artistic agency in post-industrial cities, in which, to paraphrase curator Charles Esche, ‘regional art and site-specific production are combined, a kind of everyday life art’. The role of Design 99 in Detroit is notable in this context. The architect and artist that make up this collective do not only work as commercial design consultants, they collaborate with neighbors in a social and economic deprived neighborhood where urban governance has failed to make a difference in order to develop a more sustainable security level in terms of energy and security.
These unfamiliar partnerships can also be seen to emerge in business and social institutions. The roundtable projects of economist Jeremy Rifkin are of interest. In collaboration with national and city governments Rifkin intends to develop a system for generating clean energy and of sharing the production surplus through an exchange network with the neighbors. In collaboration with architects as Stefano Boeri, he is developing a scheme for buildings that can produce energy.
A third example is the lightning division of the Dutch company Philips, which is collaborating with local governments and museums in Eindhoven in order to further develop their society driven innovation approach. In a quest to find the successor for their successful home lab, an innovation test facility, Philips opened its communication channels to communities.
As Rifkin says, if successful, these projects could very well help what explore different types of human settlements. These cooperative projects, which have a clear local basis yet are very globally linked in the peer-to-peer world wide web. They could represent a form of transformation in which a small community supervises a process of improvement in close communication with the larger urban community, which is perhaps more skeptical and less flexible.
Sources: Jeremy Rifkin, The Hydrogen Economy (New York 2003), URL: http://www.bamboostones.net/, Stefano Boeri Lecture, 'Sustainanable City', Amsterdam 18 March 2009.
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