- This event has passed.
Citizens Atlas of London Charette- CANCELLED
January 14, 2017 @ 10:30 am - 3:30 pm GMT
OUR KIND OF TOWN: Towards a Citizen’s Atlas of London
London is undergoing rapid change which is disrupting communities on a scale unknown for decades. This is happening on the basis of a model dominated by capital, with an attenuated role for democratic engagement. In so far as there is participation, it is usually in the context of imagineering and marketing rather than co-design. Knowledge of how to deal with planning is unevenly distributed. The London 2050 infrastructure plan designates opportunity areas as future regeneration hot spots. In many of them there is little tradition of activism around housing or environmental issues.
Livingmaps has developed an interdisciplinary model for mapping patterns of urban stakeholding and civic engagement, based on the concept of place intelligence. This concept, which includes tacit as well as coded knowledge related to public amenity and resources, brings together skills of navigation, narration and negotiation. It is the primary way in which different forms of social, cultural and intellectual capital are mobilised in the arenas of everyday urbanism.
Our kind of town will develop place intelligence as a basis for envisaging the quality of urban life and the built environment of the future. It will offer a critical urban pedagogy so that people can connect personal and political geographies, and can uncover the implicit features of master plans. It will engage children and young people who are London’s future. The Citizen’s Atlas of London will use maps to represent the place intelligence of Londoners who are marginalised in the current development of urban policy. This cartographic approach will be the basis for public discussion about London’s future by communities across the city and so for intervention in the master planning process.
Our kind of town will create a toolkit which can be used for teaching, learning and advocacy in schools, community projects and local campaigns. It will build an online Citizens’ Atlas of London 2050 as a sustainable platform for understanding and critiquing London 2050 at a local level. The Citizens Atlas will compliment London Mapper in providing a qualitative, close-up data mosaic of local narratives.
The work will be based in four areas chosen from both inner and outer London, and including an area with little tradition of community activism, one with a largely transient and diverse population and one with a long established community. Through a workshop programme lasting six months, citizens will produce neighbourhood maps, using photography, site observation exercises and social network and community asset mapping. Groups will research what their neighbourhood was like in 1950, and create from that a counter-factual history. They will work with Livingmaps to produce scenarios for how they would like the neighbourhood to be in 2050, and also how they expect it to be. A final session will bring the different groups together discuss each other’s neighbourhood mappings and scenarios and present them to an invited audience of planners, architects, policy makers, politicians and community activists. A touring exhibition will be created to disseminate the project, and to help set up new citizen planners’ groups.
Livingmaps Network in partnership with Building Exploratory, Just Space, Concrete Action, the Urban Lab UCL, the Open Space Centre (Open University), Department of Graphic Design, Central Saint Martins, UAL.
https://www.facebook.com/livingmapsnetwork/