Placemaking Week Europe 2024 - Rotterdam

Ever wondered what’s beneath your city streets? With more than half of the world's population living in urban areas, cities are getting creative with the limited land above ground. From bustling Latin American metropolises to sleek European capitals, urban spaces are growing upwards and downwards!

Join us as we venture into the underground wonders transforming our cities. Discover Seoul’s high-tech metro farm where robots are cultivating plants in once-abandoned subway spaces. Explore how Paris is reviving its forgotten quarries and tunnels, and how Singapore and Helsinki are leading the way in reimagining subterranean spaces.

In a world where Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo calls underground spaces an “incredible wealth,” and Hong Kong is digging deep for essential infrastructure, we’ll dive into the potential of these hidden realms.

This panel will cover:

1. What is Underground Urbanism? Uncover how utilizing these spaces can create sustainable, resilient, and equitable cities.
2. Effective Implementation: What makes underground development successful?
3. Future-Ready Planning: How can planners and city administrators harness subterranean spaces for disaster risk reduction and sustainable growth?

Get ready to dig into the future of urban living—because sometimes, the best solutions are right beneath our feet! 🌍🔍

The Happy Proximity Fresk is an engaging, thought-provoking and playful workshop created by Chaire ETI researchers (from IAE Paris Sorbonne University). It is a collaborative and creative activity to help participants self-reflect on their daily routines and the spatial and temporal dimensions of their lifestyles at a city, territory, or neighbourhood scale. Participants are invited to play fictitious personae and map their personal weekly activities on a canvas structured around the six social functions (organized by distance to their home, transportation mode and frequency.) It functions as an empowerment mechanism to trigger participants' desires and motivations to transform some of their living habits (usually built over time and therefore mostly never challenged) or practices or the local urban policies if they are decision makers or stakeholders of the city community or governance.

We want to improve the quality of life in neighbourhoods to make more places greener. As cities and housing corporations we see a lot of places that can be better used. Public spaces and semi-public places around social housing have sometimes bad quality and are not well used.

Together with our citizens and tenants we start processes to design more attractive, healthier and greener places to make more places for community, to come together, to play and give more space for biodiversity, meetings, playgrounds and climat adaption.
 
In different countries and cities we meet the same challenges. Cities and housing corporations from Portugal, the Netherlands, France and United Kingdom will show in this workshops you some good examples in our cities and together we will share our challenges and questions. How do you like to contribute to greener the areas and built communities? Which steps can you follow to engage several stakeholders to invest in greener spaces? Can you share with us your good examples? Come and join our workshop and participate with your knowledge and experiences

Experience a hands-on workshop on the potential of gamification and AI in participatory design, and discover how it can meaningfully connect communities, local governments, and other stakeholders to design better places for people.

Our session will use the Delfshaven area - where the festival is taking place, as a case study for an area that is undergoing urban renewal. In our workshop, attendees will use digital tools and board games, experiencing the potential of gamification in the design process on various scales. During the workshop, attendees will participate in a unique board game that encourages a creative dialogue where all voices are heard and common interests and disagreements are addressed, resulting in a plan expressing that dialogue.

In addition, we’ll harness cutting-edge technology to gather ideas and input from participants, processing them through AI to visualize their potential impact on the urban environment. This innovative approach demonstrates how community input can play a meaningful role in shaping the urban environment, improving the quality of urban development, and empowering communities in creating places. Our workshop emphasizes the vital role of community involvement in urban planning and the power of gamification in creating meaningful engagement.

By participating, you'll gain insights into effective participatory design techniques and experience how user input can significantly contribute to improving our cities. Schedule: Introduction and Overview Presentation of the case-study area Interactive Workshops AI-Powered Idea Visualization Group Discussion and Q&A The future of our cities is green, human-centric, and collaborative. As a decision-maker, you cannot afford to fall behind. Join us to lead the way in better cities!

Reimagine the Keilepand area together using real-time augmented reality (AR)! Ahead of Metvibee's planned launch in October, we're hosting a workshop at the Placemaking Week Europe where you can experience how AR can contribute to urban co-design.

This workshop uses collaborative AR functions of Metvibee where participants can draw and place objects (street furniture etc.) and see live updates of the co-design.

After that, we'll end the workshop with a deeper discussion on the challenges and opportunities of using AR in participatory city making, how power relations can be challenged and addressed by AR, and how an AR tool's user experience and interface can be more inclusive and contribute towards mainstreaming participatory design in how cities are developed.

Stories connect us. They have the power to change our perspectives and ignite change in our living environments. But what kind of stories should we tell? Who should the storytellers be? And who needs to listen?

In this session, we cut through the confusion that surrounds storytelling, exploring what it looks like in practice in placemaking and urban development projects. We will dive into actionable strategies for how to use storytelling to hear the stories of citizens before, during and after a project and discover how to define an impactful narrative of change and use it to connect stakeholders.

The session has three parts:
First, it starts with practical insights on how various communication forms (audio, visual, text) can be used to make placemaking and urban development processes more understandable, accessible, and impactful for citizens, professionals, and other stakeholders.

Then, participants will take part in an interactive demonstration of a new methodology for impactful and effective citizen participation, creating AI-powered stories in real time that reflect citizen experiences in our living environments.

The session ends with a closing panel discussion addressing how we can humanize our communication to reach all people, ethical considerations of AI, and human biases in storytelling, among other topics.