With more than a half of the world’s population living in cities and the effects of climate change accelerating, the need for more efficient adaptations to atone its effects demands holistic approaches where the technical, ecological and sociocultural dimensions are addressed jointly. When the sociocultural aspect goes unplanned, there are higher risks of social blockages, unsustainable solutions being prolonged and an uneven distribution of burdens, reinforcing structural inequalities. Because of this, the incorporation of communities as coproducers of our urban futures has become an urgency, demanding the development of more efficient ways to attend and include both their needs and know-hows. Key sociocultural aspects of great value for the coproduction of cities, from local urban intelligences based on the citizens’ direct experience of their environment to shared cultural meanings, resist easy quantification and subsequently are often overlooked, their potentials untapped. The territory, as a common denominator in urban matters, can work as a transdisciplinary lingua franca for territorial conciliation to encourage urban co-design processes and an efficient inclusion of these qualitative elements. This project has sought to develop transdisciplinary methodologies to render the territory into an interface to co-produce urban knowledge and increase social participation by gathering, engaging, transferring and conciliating communities’ local urban intelligences and needs.
The project joined the work, resources and expertise of four partners—ALICE and LASIG (GEOME) as academic partners with expertise on urban design and geographical analysis, art curator Hélène Mariéthoz with a focus on art-based research methods and the Commune of Vernier in the Canton of Geneva, with a will to intensify the connection between culture and territory—, a set of interrelated needs are detected that can be jointly addressed through the valorization of the territory as a shared resource between all the actors of the commune.
To broaden our understanding of these common know-hows we organised a series of walks and workshops in Vernier. These guided walks gave voice to a plurality of actors, from local associations representatives, to citizens, city officials, artists and researchers. With these encounters we sought to valorize a new perspective on the Commune’s territory, discovering places that are shared, invisible, historic or conflict-ridden, offering a new collective understanding of these areas. Walking was used as a critical tool to reveal a hidden city teeming with local urban intelligences. Beyond the "smart" paradigm, these intelligences express a plural and diverse field of social knowledge that goes from the appropriation of legal tools to create spaces of possibility within the city, traditions and customs, or collective and anonymous practices supporting sustainable cities.
[Image credits: Julien Heil]