CROWDSOURCINGs HEIMAT?

What the great imperial, commercial and intellectual centres of the world have had in common throughout history is the diversity of people they attract, and a talent for stimulating and managing cross-cultural exchanges. They success is to a large extent due to what Charles Landry and Phil Wood have called the diversity advantage (the diversity concept Landry, C. and P. Wood: 2008).

 

For centuries, human mobility and the resulting diversity of languages, religions, lifestyles, ideas and skills have been drivers of knowledge generation, growth and productivity in destination cities. For the most part, these benefits have been the result of organic processes of inter-cultural mixing and interaction in the context of daily life. However, they have usually come at a significant human cost. Creativity and innovation have often been driven by friction and conflict between ethnic and religious communities, the expression of both a survival instinct and the will to succeed despite formal and informal barriers and exclusion mechanisms between culturally defined communities. Until a few decades ago, community cohesion was not an aspiration or even as a possibility, neither was dealing with cultural diversity seen as a task for public authorities.

 

Today governance, in particular at the local level, is (in principle) more informed, ethically enlightened and resourced than ever before: nations and cities can use benign social engineering in order to reap the benefits of diversity while minimising its costs. But nations and cities are not equal vis-à-vis the demands of diversity management. While weakened nation-states tend to fall prey to populist leaders conjuring the cultural homogeneity of an imaginary golden age to mobilise voters’ fear of change, cities embrace diversity as a motor of development. In urban centres, the laisser faire of old is increasingly replaced by urban diversity strategies in an attempt to counter the natural processes of segmentation and segregation that foster inter-group mistrust and animosity and accentuate socio-economic divides.

 

Even in countries with a strong multicultural tradition, a strong awareness is emerging of the need address ethnic segregation – both special and mental – and focus urban policies in creating mixed public spaces and inclusive institutions competent in managing intercultural relations in a proactive, positive way. Such awareness is welcome as in the multiculturalism’s own showcase countries Ideological and social divides run deeper than ever. More and more people lead segregated lives, only meeting and communicating with those who think like them. Pluralist, open-minded public space is shrinking.

Urban diversity and inclusion strategies are growing increasingly sophisticated and intercultural (it no longer makes much sense to speak about majority and minorities in cities like Geneva, London and Amsterdam), less reliant on massive regeneration projects and iconic landmarks designed to attract strangers, not build communities, and more on fine-grain “eco-systemic” approaches involving inhabitants as architects and masterminds of their own place-making. The humbling of urban planners has coincided with the rise of community developers skilled in creating substantive dynamics connecting people around designing shared spaces which can foster a pluralist urban (neighborhood) identity and a sense of belonging. Some of these dynamics are so profound and sustainable that they effectively convert into lasting mechanisms taking cities into the dimension of participatory democracy.

 

We are just in the beginning to building a nuanced understanding of how such open-minded spaces emerge and the importance they hold for the local community. Publicly owned, flexibly defined in their function, sometimes managed by the users, these are spaces where unexpected and unplanned things can happen – from a flash mob to a pup-up civic agora, guerilla gardening: spaces where risks can be taken, where people can engage in doing things together rather than just talking, going over the barriers of language skills and low self-confidence.

 

Cities like Reggio Emilia in Italy and the London borough of Lewisham, when engaging in bottom-up neighborhood regeneration of “problematic” or unsafe areas (in many cases in the aftermath of traumatic events such as urban violence or racist murders), have found that in order to ensure a democratic and inclusive process, it has been necessary to go door-to-door with interpreters, so that people of different backgrounds and levels of mastering the local language, could contribute to the consultation process and voice their concerns without having to take part in formal meetings. Making the effort (and the expense) of involving everyone in a more than formal community consultation not only sends a signal to residents that everyone matters, but also helps shape a project which resembles the local community in more than one way.

 

Some cities are even considering imposing a special “tax” on developers for an artist-led community engagement process throughout the entire urban regeneration process, instead of, as usual, involving artists as an afterthought, for superficial “embellishments”.

 

Artists-led regeneration is a way of giving the city back to the citizens but also bringing the cities to the spotlight. Loures and Nuremberg involved famous graffiti artists in creating the mural paintings based on the stories and narratives of the inhabitants in the districts of Quinta de Mocho (Loures) and Langwasser (Nuremberg) in an attempt to change the image of these diverse and rather deprived neighbourhoods and give them a new impetus using diversity as a source of inspiration. These initiatives have successfully managed to change external (feeling of insecurity, fear of migrants) and internal (lack of self-esteem, lack of ownership) prejudice around the neighbourhoods. Such developments are inherently intercultural as they harness the creative power of diversity by intent, seeking to dig out and blend unique cultural perspectives and personal stores into a potent narrative of a pluralistic place which is happy to accommodate many different identities and be constantly redefined by its changing demographic realities.

 

In Lisbon the annual Todos festival reaches a new dimension in the always renewed interplay between urban fabric, landscape and creative energy. Each year the inhabitants of the diverse Mouraria district reinvent the present and the future of their neighborhood through the sounds, smells, histories, dreams and hopes of the inhabitants, offering an ephemeral experience of travelling the world within a square mile, but also shaping together the physical fabric of the neighborhood, which is after each edition enriched with urban art markers of the diverse makeup of the residents. People who live and work in Mouraria “collect it” stories and memories of their neighbours, open the doors of their homes, workplaces and places of worship. Taking diversity very seriously, Todos empowers not only people of migrant background, but has special facilities to encourage the self-expression of those with disabilities too. Conceived as a crowd-sourced cultural happening of a new genre, Todos is both curated and organically grown, an art project and a social intervention, a community therapy and an exercise in participatory democracy, an urban laboratory which is inspiring other neighborhoods and cities in Portugal.

 

Designing Dublin (2010-2011) is perhaps one of the most far-reaching and iconic examples of crowdsourcing the intercultural design of a city. Driven by the desire to revitalise a fledgling centre which had been deserted by the middle class, the city of Dublin launched a large-scale operation of social innovation in pace-making. The Designing Dublin team (including many volunteers from the city administration) started by trying to understand this phenomenon and then finding ways to make the centre a more vibrant, appealing and welcoming place for a wider and more diverse range of residents, visitors,  urban enthusiasts, etc. Over several months the team reviewed the centre and its features, diversity, challenges, and opportunities. The project covered the entire social innovation cycle – “out of the box” thinking, desire to cross boundaries, intensive conversations with citizens of all kinds of backgrounds about their vision of the city and the features which would make the centre more attractive and welcoming (such as urban sofas and green corners in unexpected places), turning the best ideas into prototypes, real-life testing, and implementing those which were found to work. No effort was spared to reach out to those who are usually excluded (or self-excluded) from such operations. The project kick-started new urban dynamics and consolidated a culture of inclusive interculturalism, with the city council casting itself as a learning organisation tuned into the pulse of the community. One of the most striking realisations Designing Dublin triggered was that the best way to re-invigorate the city centre was to inspire people to step out of their routine and rediscover it in a new way through urban experiences that are unexpected, enthusing, challenging and pleasurable. In order to deliver such experiences, the city had to foster interconnectivity, collaborations, opportunities for social interaction, in other words, it had to practice interculturality.

 

Intercultural heimat is pluralistic, open-minded, and in constant process of re-invention, it needs the interplay of diverse cultural references and inputs. An intercultural heimat is almost a negation of heimat as a collective – and collectivist – construction. It is the art of managing the city organically – using fine strokes to transform an ugly verruca where the urban skin has reacted to disruptive new arrivals, into an engine of vitality and development. It « takes a village » to design public institutions and public space which gently guide us into engaging with strangers, building connections, arguing, negotiating, making sense, making society.