Placemaking Week Europe 2024 - Rotterdam

Join us for an insightful session on the Elephant Recovery Project, where we explore how collaborative, cross-sector efforts between University of the Arts London, local businesses, and London’s Elephant and Castle community are fostering growth and resilience. Participants will gain valuable knowledge around creative placemaking, digital marketing, branding, and community engagement—key components of the project’s success. This session will delve into how the initiative, in partnership with Elephant and Castle Business Forum and The Means, worked alongside small businesses and community groups facing challenges following the closure of the historic shopping centre, post-Brexit and post Covid-19.

We’ll explore how to navigate the complexities of urban regeneration while celebrating and preserving the unique cultural identity of Elephant and Castle. Opening up discussions to share strategies around how to engage diverse communities, ensuring inclusivity and sustainability in redevelopment efforts.

This is a must-attend for anyone interested in community-driven urban planning, Higher Education placemaking and civic practice, the power of collaboration, and the future of small businesses in changing urban landscapes. It will also be of interest to creative students looking to understand how to connect their practice locally.

Join us as we explore a compelling placemaking project that brought together the initiator, policymakers, and residents to create a community swing, designed to bridge generational gaps.

This presentation will highlight how these diverse stakeholders collaborated to transform an idea into a vibrant public space that fosters social interaction and community spirit.

We'll delve into the challenges and triumphs faced during the project Ring of Swings, offering insights into the processes that made this initiative become reality. Whether you're interested in urban planning, community engagement, or innovative public spaces, this session will provide valuable perspectives on creating inclusive environments that connect people of all ages. Don't miss this opportunity to learn how a shared vision can bring a community together!

Dark Matter Labs is a not-for-profit multidisciplinary group focused on exploring and developing the institutional infrastructure necessary for the civic economy of the 21st century. Our initiative, 'Trees-as-Infrastructure' [Trees-AI], reimagines urban trees and green spaces as fundamental components of urban infrastructure.

Nature-infrastructures are recognised crucial to enhance resilience and support communities in adapting to climate change, yet investment in nature-based solutions are still falling short. Through a blend of technology, and innovative regulatory and accounting practices, Trees-AI aims to create actionable paths to enable diverse stakeholders to come together to find these critical initiatives, thus ensuring their long-term viability and sustainability, and contributing to make urban space more liveable, and foster stronger and healthier communities.  

In this panel discussion I will present a self-initiated project called "Hanging Gardens of Berlin.”

This session offers an alternative perspective on creating green public spaces: by reusing an existing body of water, purifying it and turning the whole area into a living food system.

The participants get an insight into the world of biologically grown fungi-based materials and their potential for creating future public spaces. We will also explore bio-remediation strategies of reusing existing water in our ever thirstier cities.

The presented project is a proposal for a community garden suspended from the ‘Landwehrkanal’, a waterway that runs 10km through Berlin. Anyone interested can grow their own food here, using only water from the canal for irrigation.

In the same process the canal’s water is purified through bio-remediation, letting the entire area become a thriving eco system.
 
The pots that make up the garden are biologically grown from a fungi-based material.

By presenting this community-based food infrastructure, I invite participants to re-examine our social expectations around both food and water, while proposing ways for creating new spaces of coexistence.