It has been years since I have been concerned with the issue of our consumption behaviour and practices. How can we make ourselves better consumer in order to enhance the resilience of our ecosystem? How (and who) can we provide support to our peers to this process?
Yearly Archives: 2018
Being a super civil servant, what does it take, where does it lead us to?
Interview with Gabriëlle Van Zoeren, Antwerp Circular South Project Coordinator.You appear to be enthusiastic, positive, very creative and always looking upfront/forward and, not letting down. How is it to be an innovative project coordinator?
Plan your own temporary use journey!
Visiting the City of Temporary Use
Who can still remember vacant spaces and buildings, which someday were spaces free of rules, a ground for fertile experimentation, individual empowerment and creativity development? We could grow and empower ourselves as we can remember from the 50s’ film “Le chantier des gosses (link is external)”, where children were spending their leisure time in an yet-to-be-built abandoned lot in the very centre of the city of Brussels, and where the nephew of Tati’s “My Uncle” was eating doughnuts and whistling at pedestrians so that they would bump into a lamppost.
(Self-)promotion supporting change in our cities: feedback from the URBACT Lisbon City Festival
The URBACT City Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, on 12-14 September 2018, was the third URBACT City Festival that had taken place and that I had attended. Back in 2015, the first City Festival in Riga promoted the launch for the new URBACT III Action Planning Networks and we facilitated a workshop on our capitalization work on Social Innovation in cities, together with François Jégou. The second City Festival, in 2017 in Tallinn, promoted the 97 labelled Good Practices and I facilitated two workshops including one citizens’ and stakeholders’ participation for environmental projects. This years’ festival was going back to the Riga one by celebrating the URBACT III APNs, where François Jégou and I diffused the outcomes of the REFILL network on Temporary Use.
URBACT is good at capitalising: at extracting what takes place in cities in order to make it visible to other but also at gratifying those making a positive change, and acting as drivers, at home and beyond, for a more sustainable society. My fanaticism for URBACT is not new. Continue reading
Self-promotion can support us in driving change in our cities: the Lisbon City Festival
The URBACT City Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, on 12-14 September 2018, is the third URBACT City Festival that has taken place and that I have attended. Back in 2015, the first City Festival in Riga promoted the launch for the new URBACT III Action Planning Networks and together with François Jégou, we facilitated a workshop on our capitalization work on Social Innovation in cities. The second City Festival, in 2017 in Tallinn, promoted the 97 labelled Good Practices and I facilitated two workshops including one citizens’ and stakeholders’ participation for environmental projects. This years’ festival is going back to the Riga one by celebrating the URBACT III APNs, where François Jégou and I will diffuse the outcomes of the REFILL network on Temporary Use.
URBACT is good at capitalising: at extracting what takes place in cities in order to make it visible to other but also at gratifying those making a positive change, and acting as drivers, at home and beyond, for a more sustainable society. My fanaticism for URBACT is not new. Each time URBACT surpasses itself and goes in unexpected directions. The first City festival was highly intense, diverse and rich, with a high focus on creativity. The second one was focusing on the experiences of the good practices – and their concrete work, networking, and learning from each other. This year, it is expected to be once again full of energy and key takeaways, while focusing on what we have achieved in the APN but also in the past 15 years of URBACT. How is going to feel like? Who are we going to meet and get inspired from? Who and what will surprise us? What will we take home? I must say, a few days before the opening cocktail, I am both excited and curious: what has URBACT imagined this time, in order to make change happen in our cities, throughout concrete actions, a network of like-minded practitioners and experts, serious and intense work, under the misleadingly relaxing name of “CITY FESTIVAL”?
This blogpost will be updated with key insights after the City Festival will have taken place.