S+T+ARTS Regional Centers | Repairing the Present

Inhabitant-Adaptive Future City | Challenge nº4

How might we create adaptive cities with synergies between physical and digital public city spaces?

Consortium Partner: In4Art

EU Green Deal:GD4 Sustainable and smart mobility

Problem Statement

Any city is a collection of its inhabitants, humans, and non-humans. Yet one of the most difficult things to do is involve those city’s inhabitants in shaping its future. To create future-proof cities, it is crucial that they become adaptive to those who populate them. How can new modes of collectivity through digital and physical interconnectedness bring a city and its inhabitants closer together?

Keywords

Participation, Ownership, Agency, Diversity, Involvement, (Virtual) Communities, Adaptability, Digital mobility, Co-existence, Adaptability, Interventions, Liveability, Resilience

Challenge Context

The physical public spaces in a city are designed for a period of 20-50 years, the inhabitants and their needs develop and change much quicker. In developing the environmental vision 2040 for The Hague, the involvement and participation of all inhabitants is both a need and a challenge. There is an opportunity to rethink the way the city could shape its populations and the agency of humans and non-humans in that process.

This Repairing the Present Fellowship invites artists to come with proposals on how we could strengthen the adaptability of the city of The Hague by using digital technologies to rethink the role of the actors involved. There is an urgency to re-examine our societal relationships against the background of technological acceleration in order to realize new collective futures where feedback loops between the digital and the physical ignite transformation.

The goal is to develop an artistic prototype that could pave the way towards a future in which the influence of inhabitants of the city (this could include all living matter) on the liveability and adaptability of the public environment has increased.

Fellowship Characteristics: network, opportunities, and expectations

The fellowship partners will be: 1/ Dutch engineering firm Witteveen+Bos, responsible for the environmental impact studies that support the 2040 environmental vision for The Hague, 2/ Europe’s leading technology incubator YES!Delft and 3/ S+T+ARTS Regional Center In4Art. The artist will be granted access to the partners’ venues, expertise and technologies upon need and request. The LEG consists of 14 high-level experts from industry, science, public bodies, and the arts and will form the network the artist has access to. We search for proposals that address real-time digital technology, including but not limited to the use of immersive technologies, geofencing, gamification, sovereign identity and any other IoT or AI technologies. The artist is expected to travel to the region to attend workshops, activities, or events or to conduct field research at least 4 times during the fellowship period. We search for proposals that address real-time digital technology, including but not limited to the use of immersive technologies, blockchain, gamification, and any other IoT or AI technologies.

The artist is expected to deliver a presentable outcome of the fellowship in the form of a prototype which will be included in the final exhibition at MAXXI Rome and the innovation spill-over exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe. Moreover, the artist is expected to produce and deliver a collectable outcome of the fellowship with an edition of at least 2 by the end of 2022 which will be included in the In4Art collection and possibly the Witteveen+Bos art collection.