Human Cities/ Challenging the City Scale
In 2015 BDW transformed its weekly festival to a 52-weeks-a-year impact on the city, country and region / With all the best lessons learned from the “Greatest Creative Minds of the 21st Century” / With the vision to improve quality of life in Serbia using “Design Thinking” as a tool, to improve the public environment and facilitate citizen’s participation in dialogue with the public sector.
After ten years of weekly design festivals, Belgrade Design Week needed a new challenge in 2014, right in the moment when the pan-European HUMAN CITIES/ project came along, promoting the method designing urban spaces with people taking into account their perception and interaction with the city scales, re-inventing urban territories.
Disappointed with the impossibility to extent a seven-day festival into a year long project, and Serbia’s non ability to create its own design institutions which will work during the whole year, such as Design Councils all over Europe, BDW has decided to focus on a new proposition. True to our non-profit mission, BDW identified the most neglected and weakest members of the Serbian population, namely children, youth and seniors, who need assistance in improving the quality of their everyday life, and researched projects to apply our key principles - ongoing education and international networking. With the vision to improve quality of life in Serbia using “design thinking” as a tool, to improve the public environment and facilitate citizen’s participation in dialogue with the public sector, BDW investigated the situation with urban public spaces, and concluded that playgrounds for children and exercise grounds for seniors, often life threatening and closed by health and safety inspections, have been seriously neglected.
The Human Cities/ partners have carried out urban experimentations in 11 European cities empowering citizens to rethink the spaces in which they live, work and spend their leisure time. Through conversations with the involved people, the Human Cities/ partners examine how bottom-up processes and their design, tools and instruments generate new ideas to reinvent the city. It offers inspiration and insights to everyone, from practitioners and politicians to designers and active citizens, eager to try out new ways to produce more human cities together.
Urban public space and the urban fabric are emerging more and more as a field of creative intervention and collaboration between artists, designers, architects, sociologists, writers, philosophers, urban planners and landscape architects. In this context, Human Cities/ proposes interdisciplinary research and actions that aims enhance the emergence of creative cities seen much as a laboratory for informal, temporary, creative performances and installations of static or moving forms and objects challenging our existing art, architecture and design stereotypes.
Sustainability and creativity in urban design are also more and more connected to educational and participative programmes reaching all kind of public within the already explored and not yet studied urban territories. Both are also linked to more dense digital and media environments surrounding us as well as to the ephemeral, the temporary and the creation of new typologies of public space where creative people can meet, play, live and enjoy the site specificity and qualities of the places to be.
European cities today face both frightening threats and exhilarating challenges, becoming harder to manage and to understand, while fostering their role as the drivers and hubs of our economies. Not only must they compete in attractiveness, in order to encourage talents-both creative and academic-to move in (or not to move abroad), they also need to create a framework that promotes their human capital, while coping with social fragmentation and sustainability. Human Cities/ as a project and philosophy is therefore positioning itself towards artifacts and spontaneous creations which are seen and perceived in their uses, living scenarios as well as in their complex urban perspectives.
