Future Divercities

ongoing

Future DiverCities seeks to re-imagine culture-led regeneration of urban empty space in an ecological way, developing new kinds of cultural interventions in 8 European Cities. Until now the cultural regeneration route has often led to the establishment of new built spaces, development of infrastructure and creation of landscape fixtures. With major changes in the way we inhabit our cities, it is becoming urgent to address urban cultural regeneration in a more ecological way, as the approach taken to date will not suffice to address the major challenge of building environmentally resilient cities. There is a space and a demand to inject new project’s concepts on how to better weave together culture/regeneration/ecology and that’s what the 13 partners from 10 countries involved in the project propose to do. They will demonstrate through long experimentation in urban settings how culture-led projects can produce ecological transformation. The project’s pilots, led by 9 Creative hubs, will explore the positive facets of the void in cityspace and imagine new ways to create and to design participative cultural interventions in vacant urban spaces to enhance its ecological value. The creative hubs and their partners will be trained along the way building expertise in urban ecology and capacity as ecological changemakers. The project’s experimentations are plugged into 3 ECOCs plans allowing them to gain a much wider impact. Parallel to this, a wider group of hubs leaders (ECHN) will engage in the project through twinning to learn directly from the experience. The pilots will be testbeds for researchers who will draw recommendations and methods to better qualify and systemise the ecological factor in culture-led urban regeneration strategies. The project seeks to prepare creative hubs’ leaders in leading bigger conversations about sustainable urban regeneration, contributing to a change of policy paradigm with the ecology at its heart.