This is a project that shows how you can create
a space that minimises the distance
between the decision-makers and the citizens,
where they co-create
creative solutions for the community
in their small town.
When addressing today's challenges in city planning,
solutions and innovations
should be fair and embraced by everyone.
arki_lab seeks to bridge the gap
between decision-makers and citizens.
In Asnæs they transformed an
empty property into a co-creative city lab,
where students build prototypes of their
ideas for the town.
This created a sense of ownership around the city and
increased participation
by young citizens.
The Empty Property as Co-Creative City Lab,
one of many Promising Practices presented by
Act Now.
So in this project we turned
an empty building in
a train station, the train station in Asnæs,  into
a city lab. That was a good location because that was
where the young people came in every morning and left
to go home every afternoon after school.
It was also a place for us to meet
the community, the commuters, also the grown ups.
People waiting for the train, they're easy to talk to, right?
But of course the main experiment was: what does it
mean when you do these
involvement processes where you go out and ask
people and no one really meets the architects
or the municipality, the people in decision. Couldn't it
have a greater effect if the population actually
knew that this is a physical platform for change, this is where we can meet
the architects, this is where I can meet
the rest of the community? So this is the platform for change.
So that was one of the experiments we also did in this project.
Involving the youth is important, I think,
everywhere, in every kind of context,
in every city or every town, no matter
the size and the amount of young
people living there. And the basic reason why it's
very important, of course, is that that's democracy.
I know you're not allowed to vote until
you're 18 but democracy should happen even
before the age of 18.
They also represent a source of knowledge for the final
design.
But when you work with a community like that
and you involve not only youth but also the rest
of the citizens, you also have the opportunity
to create community across age.
So that's also a result, a very important result
of not only this project, but every project we are
involved in, to create community as we go along.
This is another part, important part, of the
product, to build
community, create networks.
One of the challenging things about involving youth
in these kind of processes is motivating
them because they, when you start a project like this,
they're like "Yeah, we've been part of
this before, nothing happened. Adults, they say
they want to listen to the youth but they don't and why should we get
involved?" So building trust first off
is very important in these kinds of processes.
So our take on that, also to get a
large group represented and not just the resourceful young people
that normally participate in these kinds of processes,
is to go through the schools. So they had to
create a project
that reflected the citizens' ideas and
of course their own needs. So in that way we were
involving the youth, they were learning something,
we were opening up the language of architecture and urban planning for them,
so they could participate in a
meaningful way. And at the same time, of course,
help save the future spaces of
Asnæs.
 
 
