Last Tuesday we hosted our fourth Expo and we had an amazing night! We want to thank all Urbanistas who joined us for making it a very interesting and inspiring evening. It was great to see many new but also lots of familiar faces, and we loved everyone contributing so enthusiastically to the conversation.
For this edition we were kindly hosted by Independent School for the City in their beautiful event space. After grabbing a drink and some snacks we were ready to enjoy an evening filled with exciting topics. This time around we had the pleasure to host two speakers, Aimée and Oleksandra, who shared their ideas and experiences with us. If you couldn't join us last week here's a recap for you to catch up on what was discussed. Aimée Kouyoumdjian, who works as a junior architect at 01-10 Architecten, started the evening with a problem that she wants to tackle. She likes to work on social projects in the city, but does not know how to find the right people to work with. While working together with people who have different qualities and characters is very important. There is not one clear platform where projects are shown and people can get in contact. This can be either a digital platform or a physical place (or a combination of both). She introduced to us the idea of a carpet that can be placed in any place to be visible to everybody and to connect people on the spot, inhabitants and professionals. The idea of a physical space intrigued the group and there was an interesting discussion on what it should be. Soon someone came with the concept of speed-dating for social projects, a great way to connect in a quick but personal way! Our second speaker was Oleksandra Tkachenko, currently working at Studio for New Realities. She shared her story about a project in her home town in Ukraine. A design was made for the riverbank, a potentially good space that would give the city more identity. But this design was not great and Oleksandra was not able to sleep after seeing the renders of the project. She decided to do something about it and create a counterproposal by setting up her own competition for the area. She contacted all her connections in Ukraine and tried to get the citizens involved to get input for the competition brief. In the end they got four entries of young urban Ukrainian professionals and the inhabitants, together with a jury decided the winner. This project was presented to the local authorities, but up until now, nothing is happening with it unfortunately. The group was very impressed by her activism and there was an informative discussion on how to get the project going again.
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