Don’t miss the Living Streets workshop on 18 April in Rennes, France !
Smart living or living smart ? From engagement to citizen ownership during the Energy Cities Annual Conference
Come
and join this inspiring day and discover diverse initiatives that can
be catalysts for social innovation and citizen ownership at building,
street, neighbourhood level and even in the whole city. How we can use
public space to make our daily lives better, smarter, happier ?
Imagine streets with less cars. The freed space can easily be turned
into places to meet, play or grow... places that benefit people, not
machines. How can we co-create our neighbourhood with refurbished homes,
urban living labs, district sharing boxes, civic crowdfunding for
renewables and much more. So many real stories that make the city of
tomorrow visible today and make you look differently at your city, your
street and your job !
More information ©shutterstock |
How can we organise our daily lives without using our cars as much as we do today ?
By removing the car and finding other places for parking, new space
becomes available and can be turned into “places” for community,
interaction, support (playgrounds for children, picnic benches, pop-up
bars, urban agriculture, new business opportunities-for instance,
develop and test new ways for grocery shopping or let inhabitants
experiment with new ways of electric car sharing, etc.).
Local authorities are no longer perceived to be the only actor to solve complex issues faced in cities.
Local authorities, businesses and residents more than ever need each
other to find creative solutions by challenging each other in a smart
way in how we think, act and learn. We believe that in every city there
are many people from different backgrounds, from companies and within
government administrations ready to join forces and search for these
solutions.
Through the Living Streets project we bring this energy and creativity of these people together and will
make "the city of tomorrow" visible today. The aim is to learn from all these practical experiences and to reflect on a sustainable society.
In Ghent, Living Streets have been experimented since 2013.
This is a unique pilot initiative, coordinated by Lab of Troy, an
independent network of collaborating citizens, businesses, governments
and organisations and developed with the support of the municipality of
Ghent.
This initiative enables inhabitants to temporarily transform their
street into a sustainable place they have always dreamed of. One of the
main strategic questions of this experiment is how we can organise our
daily lives without using our cars as much as we do today. By removing
the car and finding other places for parking, new space becomes
available for other functions.
Living Streets in Ghent © photo Dries Gysels
Living Streets is not a story of individuals trying to make their own
street car-free. It’s a story of hundreds of people and dozens of
streets, together with people from companies and from the city
departments, searching for answers to make it possible that newly paved
streets and neighbourhoods will always be living streets and make all
parts of the society ready for it.
In this Living Streets project, 7 pilot cities (Brussels,
Milton Keynes, Ivanic-Grad, Zadar, Turin, Rotterdam, La Rochelle) will
test real life experiments while temporarily transforming streets into
living labs, tackling different aspects : social
cohesion, options for sustainable transport, improved and sustainable
delivery of goods, local job creation, local food production (urban
agriculture), crowdfunding.