In the intensity of cities, community and solidarity no longer arise organically from a shared identity. Nothing new in that. At the same time the social, economic and environmental challenges staring us down can only be solved collectively. How to reconcile those two wisdoms? In order to crystalise in today (and tomorrow’s) hyper-diverse neighbourhoods, communities need a spark: someone to broker the connection.
Broker
Governments and formal institutions tend to struggle here. It requires a third player, one nimble and independent enough to move at the speed of communities as they form.
That's the role City Mine(d) aims to play. In the densest, most diverse corners of the city, we bring people together.
Human scale system change
Many of today’s biggest challenges are systemic - water, energy, the local economy, logistics. They sound abstract and remote from anyone’s daily life. Until you trace then down to where they touch people: a tap, a power socket, a front door. That’s where we start imagining and designing alternatives: — new ways of doing things that cut costs and boost comfort for citizens while also making a real dent at the scale of the city and the planet. It's a shared journey of learning and connecting, always driven by one thing: actually building the prototype we imagined.
As brokers, we craft an engaging and credible (or incredible) narrative, develop methods and means of organising, and make physical spaces accessible.
- We are proud contributors to SunSud, the first energy community by and for people facing energy poverty.
- Palette is setting up a used-frying-oil recycling facility in the Marolles.
- Shared Spaces organises and supports others who want to set up collective run community buildings.
- And in Lab we try to capture the lessons we learn and pass them on.
Architecture of participation
Through all this we advocate a crucial design principle, which is an architecture of participation. From the belief that user-contribution can create collective value, it defends that every type of design, from institutions that govern our lives to the objects that shape our day, should be designed in a way that the end user can contribute to their optimization. They would be better because users were involved when they were designed, they get better by using them because user-contributions can be adopted. Participation not as an add-on, but as a core feature, a built-in functionality.