Unlimited Cities (in French Villes sans limites) are methods and apps to facilitate the civil society involvement in urban transformations. Unlimited Cities DIY is an open-source upgrade of the application linked with the New Urban Agenda of the United Nations "Habitat III" Conference.
These apps that can be used on mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) for people to express their views on the evolution of a neighbourhood before future developments are outlined by professionals. "Through a simple interface, they make up a realistic representation of their expectations for a given site. Six cursors can be played with: urban density, nature, mobility, neighbourhood life, digital, creativity/art in the city. Designed by the UFO urban planning agency [1] in partnership with the HOST architectural and urban planning firm, the apps provides upstream information to urban project developers, as well as to people to query their design wishes and thus to appropriate the future project.”. [2] Thus the Unlimited Cities method gives the civil society the opportunity to act and co-construct with professional urban developers without being subject to solutions predetermined by experts and public authorities.
According to one of its creators, the urban architect Alain Renk: "Today the future of cities and metropoles lies less in the poetic, imaginary and solitary techniques found in Jules Verne’s novels than in capacities offered by digital mediations to imagine, represent and openly share knowledge, through the collective intelligence, offering opportunities to consider less standardized and prioritized lifestyles, freer creativity, shorter design and manufacturing circuits of circular economies and, ultimately, preservation of common goods. [3]
The project originates in 2002 at the Orleans ArchiLab international meetings, with the publication of the book named Construire la Ville Complexe? (Building the Complex City?), published by Jean Michel Place, a well-known editor in the world of architecture. Then in 2007 with a research using digital urban ecosystem simulators on the Plan Construction Architecture du Ministère du développement durable (Construction Architecture Plan of the Ministry of Sustainable Development). A crossed interview [4] with Alain Renk and the sociologist Marc Augé discusses the possibilities of simulators to operate the collective intelligence.
In 2009, the HOST Agency, responsible for the creation of the Civic-Tech UFO, got the certification of the Cap Digital and Advancity competitiveness clusters to mount the UrbanD collaborative research program, [5] intended to lay the collaborative software theoretical and technical basis for the evaluation and representation of the quality of urban life to enlighten decisions. This 3-year program (from early 2010 to late 2012) was the basis for the creation of "Unlimited Cities", apps and required an 800 000 € budget that was half funded by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) subsidies. [6]
In June 2011 a beta version of Unlimited Cities PRO is presented in Paris in the Futur en Seine Festival with real world tests with visitors, then shown in Tokyo in November and in Rio de Janeiro in December of the same year.
On October 2, 2012, the first operational deployment is implemented by the town hall of Rennes,: [7] [8] " the first tests were carried out in the area around the TGV1 train station and the prison demolition site in Rennes, and we discovered that when being able to build what they wanted, users quickly forgot reluctance such as for urban density, and they conceived urban projects that often went against conventional wisdom. The idea of urban density and tall buildings is often rejected, but it is accepted as soon as people can adapt it to their own logic.”. [9]
Then the tool is implemented in Montpellier [10] in June 2013. Then in June, July and August in Evreux, where UFO worked on the conversion of the downtown former Saint-Louis Hospital., [11] [12]
In June 2015 in Grenoble, "the application is used to imagine, jointly with the population, solutions to give more visibility to the transport offer. It is a different way of working. We do not turn anymore only to the planners but we directly go to the locals and ask for their opinion, their vision. The purpose is obviously to increase buses utilization, but it is also to have people satisfied with the arrangements put in place. ". [13]
The first cities to use Unlimited Cities PRO call the attention due to the mediators’ ability to query people in the street, often off guard, with an appealing playful tablet. Their presence in the neighbourhoods for several weeks, right where people live and work, prompts the number of participants to be much higher (over 1 600 people in Evreux) than with conventional methods of consultation that struggle to get people go to places allocated for this. These achievements arouse the interest of some researchers who will analyse some attitude changes in urban professionals and citizens. Can we talk about a rebirth of participatory democracy? Are those images, which belong to hyperrealism, misleading or conversely are they accessible to all kinds of people? Are the Open-Source dimension of the collected data and its accessibility in real time involved in building trust between experts and non-experts? The method is the topic of several scientific articles, [14] [15] and has been honoured with several awards in France, as well as with the Open Cities Award from the European Commission.
The first requests were initially applied for in Rio, in 2011, for associations to use the software in the favelas, and then recurrently in Africa, South America and India. In parallel associations and groups in Europe also wanted to be free to implement, in their territories and independently, the collaborative urban planning device without needing further financing than users’ support. In June 2013 the Civic-Tech UFO presented at the festival Futur en Seine the Unlimited Cities DIY prototype: an open source, free and easy to implement upgrade. Presentations of the beta version are then non-stop: September 2013 Nantes for Ecocity symposium; November 2013, Barcelona in the Open Cities Award Ceremony; January 2014 Rennes for a meeting at the Institute of Urbanism, March 2014 Le Havre at a conference of Urbanism collaboration; May 2014 London in the Franco-British symposium on Smart-Cities; July 2014 Berlin for the Open Knowledge Festival; early October 2014 Hyderabad, India for Congress Metropolis; late October 2014 Wuhan China for the conference of the Sino-French ecocity Caiden; 2015 Wroclaw for the Hacking of the Social Operating System; September 2015, Lyon at the annual conference of the national Federation Planning Agencies and many other workshops that confirmed recurring applications for an open-source version easy to implement.
2016 has been showing a strong acceleration of the open-source version expansion because several workshops were organized with the University of Lyon in April to redesign the campus of the Central School (Wikibuilding-campus project), and then again in China several conferences and use of the software with farmers (Wikibuilding-Village project), with children (project Wikibuilding Natur), and with students and faculty of the University of Wuhan HUST.
The first contacts between the agency UN-Habitat and Unlimited Cities DIY software are held in October 2014 in Hyderabad with the City Resilience Profiling Program and then in Barcelona in 2015. The connection is concretized in the following Habitat III Conference. Held every twenty years, Habitat conferences organized by the UN form a sounding board that accelerates the consideration of major urban issues in public policy. This year 2016, the preparatory document for the Habitat III Conference in Quito highlights the need to evolve towards urban planning construction carried together with civil society. The non-profit organisation "7 Milliards d'urbanistes (7 billion urban planners) " [16] will be present in Quito to introduce the open source Unlimited Cities DIY software to delegates of the 197 countries member for collaborative urban planning to become available to the greatest possible number of people.
In 2015, the Wikibuilding project designed for the future Paris Rive gauche is preselected under the contest "Réinventer Paris." [17]
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