Recoded City: Co-creating Urban Futures

New mindsets, methods, tools and technologies can create a renaissance in urban sustainability. As the book Recoded City shows, localist design strategies and interventions are already forging new stakeholder dynamics, and through various collaboration processes and sophisticated DIY approaches that make more with less, are solving problems everywhere.

The burgeoning practice of participatory placemaking, which Ermacora terms ‘recoding’, combines bottom-up and top-down thinking. Through its ways and means of regenerating and rebalancing neighbourhoods affected by financial or social segregation, it represents a new standard for urban design.

Ermacorra and Bullivant will discus these new collaborative, distributed governance and welfare models as emerging platforms of the open society, the democratisation of technology, ‘wiki culture’ and art as a community actor. It sheds light on issues including appropriate funding models, priorities of best practice in participatory placemaking, the nurturing of local assets, evaluation processes, and how to consider legacy.

The speakers will each discuss Recoded City’s themes in the light of their individual
career paths, in the case of Ermacora and his extensive professional placemaking consultancy globally, directly responding to the challenges of the Anthropocene era, and ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals, COP21 and Habitat III. He will explain his approach to creating commons, the relationship between places, people and data, and his evolving philosophy of design supporting more inclusive, distributed, open urban places through greater circularity, resilience and systems level biomimicry.

In her talk, Bullivant will convey her cultural historical perspectives on global shifts towards adaptive planning which have shaped exhibitions, books and her webzine on liveable urbanism, Urbanista.org. She will predominantly, but not exclusively, focus on examples from the Global South, and other unstable contexts, and talk about the shift from masterplanning and investment-dominated zoning to social and cultural situational strategies and enrichment, including through hyper-local approaches.