The urban has become the prime focus of contemporary growth and development. Planning for it has escaped the urban planner's office, with decision making dispersed throughout different governance structures. Unfortunately, this hasn’t made it more inclusive.
How can we design a one stop shop public planning service that would bring together public authorities, private developers, and civil society? Urboteca is an ongoing project and a long-term vision for achieving just this. It is an Urban Living Lab that seeks to define how participatory planning should look like as a 21st-century service. It is an urban planning festival on wheels, an attractive mobile physical space which acts as a test-bed for new types of public engagement tools revolving around behavioral economics principles, gamification and service design.
Since 2014, our workshops have managed to create an ever-evolving negotiation environment for planners, developers, and civil society groups in the city of Bucharest.
The Urboteca Mobile Pavilion acts as an experimental physical interface for our services. Its design is inspired by modern food truck culture and acts as a temporary vibrant public space which stimulates interaction, creativity and curiosity for participants. More importantly, through its mobile nature, it facilitates debates about projects exactly on the spot where they will be implemented.
Since 2014 the Urboteca Mobile Pavilion has visited 8 neighborhoods in Bucharest, Romania, working with local community groups to find contextualised solutions to local urban planning issues.
Each event is structured into two parts. The preparation phase focused on stakeholder mapping and interviews and the events themselves, designed as a two days neighborhood festivals, combining activities proposed by local citizen groups with activities focused on the subject of the workshop: urban audit walks, participatory mapping exercises, role playing and vision development games, round table discussion and a comprehensive training about getting involved into the formal planning process.
A snapshot from our event at Street Delivery Festival 2015
The project also includes an online educational platform describing the local planning process and terminology along with interactive maps showcasing open data from the local Bucharest municipality. The open data section is in constant expansion and currently features data about local planning applications, projects that are subjected to public debates, green spaces, historical buildings and live air quality data
