Barcelona walkshop 2012
I was lucky to attend the first Barcelona city walkshop in 2010 [Adam Greenfield walkshop definition], organized by Citilab (Enric Senabre and Chris Pinchen aka cataspanglish) leaded by Adam Greenfield and Kim Nurri through the city center of Barcelona. The walkshop was great and thanks to the interesting dissertation of Adam and the interaction of the walkshoppers [Videos of the Walkshop 2010].
Some months later the first walkshop Enric, Chris and me tried to use the walkshop methodology on educational purposes. The main goal of the session was how to show to the children to discover what happens in their cities and furthermore make them aware of the data available in every corner and encourage them to use that information for good. The activity was very interesting and was held within the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona 2010 [Drumbeat City Walkshop].
A couple of months ago, Christine Perey [Spime Wrangler] contacted me in order to know if I would be interested on participate on the organization of a second Barcelona walkshop, maybe repeating the steps of the Barcelona walkshop 2010. I was interested from the first second, so after some Skype calls and the London Open IOT Assembly [Open IoT Assembly] we agreed to begin the preparation of the Barcelona walkshop 2012. Afterthat, I co-organized (with her virtual assistence) the 2nd IoT Barcelona meetup [IoT Barcelona] with the aim to ask to the community who would like to get involved in the Barcelona walkshop, and also to push the IoT Barcelona community and search a natural leader for the IoT community. More than 40 people came at the event and we could see very interesting IoT projects made in Barcelona. Lot of people were interested by the walkshop concept, so we are working on it.
My vision of the Barcelona walkshop 2012
My vision of the Barcelona walkshop 2012 should be a space where different kind of people with different profiles (non technical profiles only, also local communities, youth or eldery for example) could meet and discuss about the future of the cities. In general this kind of meetings congregates vertical profiles that do not help to see the whole problem and discuss it from as much angles as possible (e.g. architectural debate about the rebuilding of a street or plaza; the mobile developer group for mapping services; politics and big companies talking about smart cities; or the privacy experts with other vertical experts arguing about the future of the over-surveilled citizens as some random examples). And even when all of these profiles are together in a room, it's complicated to generate a creativity session where all of the knowledge can go further and does not remain in every silo.
My main goal for the Barcelona city walkshop is to create different walkshops in Barcelona, to motivate as many people as possible to come to share their knowledge with us following the Peer 2 Peer University methodology [P2PU] and afterthat meetup all the people in a big room to do some creativity sessions, hackathons, sketches and even pitches about how should be Barcelona in 10 years.
Some of my walkshop ideas for a 90 minutes walk at Barcelona would be:
- The origin of the city, the origin of the Eixample, Olympic Village and Forum and how nowadays the city hall is changing the original urban design in order to improve the citizens life, or not (e.g. why Cerdà designed the octogonal islands, new interior squares: park de l'aigua, urban farms, new kind of squares with no benches but chairs, new bike lanes and less parking spaces, etc.). What decisions should be taken in the future?
- How the city has evolved to the one of the most famous cities in the world? Where is the origin of the city? origin of the name? romans? wars? how could we access to that information with our devices? how could people introduce virtual knowledge into physical spaces? how we could introduce the wisdom of crowds into the physical city? who should manage these information?
- The new 22@ neighbourhood is the official city hall bet through the called "smart cities". A bunch of "intelligent" devices are being tested in the neighbourhood. What are the results? How the citizens could access to the data? What is the data available in Internet from the 22@ area? Who are the owners of the generated data? How are the contracts being done? Who pay for it? Who would repair the test devices?
Finally, the final goal of the Barcelona walkshop is to create a manifesto from the Adam and Nurri proposal to be replied in other cities and even improved.
If you have any comment, don't hesitate to contact me :)
Marc Pous