Human Cities/

In 2015 BDW transformed the 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.

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.

Since 2014, the Human Cities/ network co-founded by the Creative Europe Programme, has been working on Challenging the City Scale to question the urban scale and investigate co-creation in cities.