Open City: Guimarães
Artistic commissions which explored how ‘openness’ in city development can improve the social, cultural, and economic lives of inhabitants.
Society, our culture, our cities are re-designed over and over again. Our cities have become layer cakes of what has been and is to be, they are never finished, society is never finished, as are our societal issues.
- Bas van Abel & Marleen Stikker, Waag Society
How would you like your city to be in the future? What will it look like, who will govern it, and how will people live together in it? From Bladerunner to Minority Report, film and TV are steeped in visions of ‘smart cities’ driven by technology and screens. But are these the kind of cities we want to live in? Should our governments be investing in this vision? What might new technologies mean in reality for how we travel, live, work and play?
In the Portuguese city of Guimarães - 2012 European Capital of Culture - Watershed produced a series of artistic commissions that explored how ‘openness’ in city development could improve the social, cultural, and economic lives of their inhabitants. As part of Guimarães 2012, Watershed partnered with Tom Fleming (Programme Director of the ‘Cidade’ (City) Programme) to deliver Open City as part of the Creative Futures programme. Open City looked at the ways technology can be used to improve transport, energy, health, and environment control, and also how it can improve the way cities are designed and governed, by involving citizens and communities in the development and decision making of government.
Open City is comprised of a number of artist commissions and think pieces, and the website invites people to comment on the various topics within open city thinking. From James Bridle's citizen street mapping of this medieval city, Charles Leadbeater's think piece on the importance of hospitality in cities, to a film imagining a technologically enhanced Guimarães of the future, the programme explored the different ways technology can be used to encourage openness in relation to city development.
Related Links:
Guimaraes 2012: European Capital of Culture
Charles Leadbeater: We Think - The Power of Mass Creativity
Ended in November 2012