Co-design and urban resilience: visioning tools for commoning resilience practices

Abstract

In response to the environmental and social challenges of an uncertain future, practitioners and communities across Europe and beyond have started to engage with the concept of ‘resilience’ and experiment with forms of local resilience. However, many of these initiatives tend to remain localised, isolated projects, with little capacity to instigate broader change and at risk to disappear by not having the means to become sustainable in the longer term. We suggest that one way of sustaining and scaling local resilience practices is by developing digital tools that could enable connections and knowledge sharing across locations, through commoning in the digital realm. In this paper, we introduce the specific co-design process we devised with the aim to develop an initial ‘brief’ for potential tools. By creating a co-design process that is situated, mediated, networked and open-source, we argue that the commoning process initiated in this project has the potential to evolve and expand, beyond the project time and initial user base—an essential quality in the context of collectively enhancing urban resilience through knowledge sharing and mutual support.

Keywords:

• Resilience practices
• commoning
• resourcefulness
• situatedness
• network-based scaling
• digital tools

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all the participants to the workshops in Paris, London and Bucharest, with special thanks to Atelier d’Architecture Autogeree, Public Works and StudioBasar.

Notes

1. https://www.wikihouse.cc/.

2. https://rebargroup.org/.

3. https://www.urbantactics.org/.

4. https://596acres.org/.

5. The architectural practices are: Atelier d’Architecture Autogeree (AAA), Paris (www.urbantactics.org); Public Works, London (www.publicworksgroup.net) and studioBasar, Bucharest (www.studiobasar.ro).

6. The project has a total duration of two years.

7. https://r-urban-wick.net/.

8. https://r-urban.net/en/.

9. https://www.amap-idf.org/.