Innovative City
Goal:
To articulate a new speech relating urbanism, economic promotion, social cohesion and participation from the new perspectives given by the information technologies.
Motivation:
The urban development planning model based on the quality of the space as a springboard of economic development is finishing its validity. On one hand, the intensity of knowledge creation generates some more long-term possibilities of economic development than the advantages derived from the physical thing, especially from the arrangement of the urban space.
On the other hand, new technologies are the base of intensive knowledge activities development and, in addition, of the eminent social and cooperative component of the last technological incorporations. They generate open cooperative and innovative dynamics that don't shrivel in the economy but they reverberate onto the social sphere. It is the moment to plan the possibilities of local development from the prevalence of the relations and the metaphors of technology.
Citilab has received requests and suggestions from the municipal area, especially from the units of economic promotion, in the sense of helping to rethink local strategy from technology.
We have also received similar suggestions about the new social and economic ways of participation and on the creation of value from the citizenship from urbanism experts, thinking promoters and many others. From all of them came the proposal to articulate some conferences on innovative and digital cities.
Specific characteristics
This conference, that we have named UrbanLabs, will be developed in three different phases. The first one would focus on the topics to be discussed at the on-line discussion, and activate them. At the same time, related projects ideas will be summoned.
The second phase is the conference itself, where people and institutions with similar projects meet and are complemented by specific workshops to refine the action plans. The conference ends with a commitment declaration to develop the projects. The third part of the conference is the project monitoring and the creation of a community of people and institutions implied on its realization, and to extract conclusions from them.
Worldwide known experts would attend the conference on participative urbanism, open and cooperative innovation, infrastructure, cooperatives and cooperative architecture and also participative local design net management.
