human cities

    Data

    Project: Human Cities_Challenging the City Scale (2014-2018)
    Location: UE
    Project leader: Cité du design, Saint-Étienne [FR]
    Partners: Culture Lab, Brussels [BE]; Bilbao-Bizkaia Design & Creativity Council (BEAZ), Bilbao [ES]; Association of Estonian designers, Tallinn [EST]; FH Joanneum, Graz [AT]; Association Design Week Belgrade (BDW), Belgrade [RS]; The Castle Cieszyn Design Centre, Cieszyn [PL]; Clear Village, London [UK]; Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia (UIRS), Ljubljana [SI]; Aalto University, Helsinki [FI]; Pro Materia, Brussels [BE]; Politecnico di Milano, Milano [IT]
    Funding: Project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
    Participants from Aalto University: Antti Ahlava, Jarmo Suominen, Fernando Nieto, Pekka Tynkkynen, Saana Rossi, Mia Hertsberg
    Role: postdoctoral researcher within Group X

    ImpressionEU logo

    Information

    Human Cities_Challenging the City Scale (2014-2018)

    The Cité du design, leader of the European programme “Human Cities_Challenging the City Scale (2014-2018)” proposes to cross the itineraries of the 12 European partners, UNESCO Cities of Design and European Living Labs. “Human Cities” is about exploring the way in which the inhabitants reclaim the constantly evolving contemporary city (especially through experiments in the urban space) and ways of (re)inventing city life.

    Cities face many challenges, linked to accelerating urbanisation and its effects on the forms of social organisation. The model of the traditional city, with a centre and a surrounding area, is disappearing, to be replaced by a world of networks, connections and multipolarity: data flows are winning over premises. These structural changes are impacting both people and places, like shops in town and city centres.

    The project Human Cities_Challenging the City Scale (2014-2018) is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

    Human Cities is shaped as a multidisciplinary European network composed of various profiles: universities, design centers and design weeks, ICT platforms, service design and creative design consultancies. Led by Cité du design de Saint-Etienne [FR], the partners share their know-how in innovating with people in the urban space using design as a creative and sustainable tool.

    The focus of Human Cities Network (2014-2018) is to analyse, test and implement the process of engaging people in co-creating and “challenging the City scale and Flow space in Europe today”. People are the key to design change in a network society and to respond to the growth of ‘flow space’, which is both physical and digital. To go beyond planning practices on the urban territories, the partner cities are enhancing unplanned activities within a frame of 13 shared values: empathy, wellbeing, sustainability, intimacy and conviviality, mobility and accessibility, imagination and leisure, aesthetics, sensoriality, solidarity and respect. Those values applied to everyone follow an intergenerational equity. We are here on a subjective territory where ‘an alternative environment’ is sought. By rejecting ‘specialities’ and compartmentalised disciplines, this interdisciplinary and multicultural European partnership brings together designers, architects, urban planners, researchers, sociologists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, translators, artists, historians and art historians, bloggers…

    Human Cities website

    Back To Top