Announcement: IOS Platform Open Cities: Creative Methods & Social Labs for Resilient Public Futures

Recently, the IOS platform Open Cities: Creative Methods & Social Labs for Resilient Public Futures has been officially inaugurated. The platform is co-led by Nanna Verhoeff, who is also part of Urban Interfaces.

The Open Cities Platform aims to facilitate and inspire interdisciplinary, inter-professional, and international collaborations between scholars, students, cultural practitioners, policymakers, and civic communities. Collaborators are invited to critically reflect on and design proposals for how cities and their institutions transform in response to various local and global developments that bring about challenges as well as opportunities for institutional and societal change in the Global South and the Global North. Various complex challenges emerge from processes of (de)industrialization, bureaucratization, gentrification, and segregation, to mediatization, algorithmization, datafication, and energy transitions and climate change. These processes have differential impacts on the actionability and resilience of various social groups to adapt to inequalities and possible erosions of publicness. We propose that actively and collaboratively engaging with these challenges offers opportunities for resilient public futures for open cities.

The Open Cities Platform’s unique focus lies in the co-development and deployment of creative methods for collaborative approaches, intended to design proposals for more equitable and resilient urban transformations. Central to this is approach is the concept of social labs, which describe spaces for collaboration between various stakeholders to experiment, protype, and innovate proposals and imaginaries for resilient public futures for open cities. The Open Cities Platform intends to accommodate various academic disciplines, cultural institutions, and civic initiatives to effectively respond to, and engage with, contemporary urban frictions, challenges, and opportunities. Thus, it is open to an interdisciplinary community active in research, teaching, and public engagement to analyze what such engaged urban ‘‘openness” entails in concrete, local urban, cultural settings and to co-develop and co-create transformative proposals for resilient public futures. 

If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, please feel free to send an e-mail to opencities@uu.nl.