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Trees as Infrastructure by EIT Climate-KIC [EU] // EXPERIMENT WORKSHOPS

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Within cities, trees and humans are enmeshed in a rich network of agencies and dependencies sharing intimate relations and mutual obligations towards preserving a common, liveable place. Recognizing urban trees beyond their Aesthetic presence and treating them as city co-inhabitants might offer a better way to attend to our relations and establish a tangled web of links to support living processes. Urban trees can be companions, communities, providers, expert Witnesses, economies, data stories or resourceful Ancestors.

Using the lens of Trees as Infrastructure, we will imagine and identify the most controversi al to pics. For example – what happens when this topic becomes (inevitabl y) political? What happens if the media use it as a ‘greenwashed feel good piece’ without thoroughly discussing the full breadth of the story? How does this apply to marginalized communities? 

In the workshops, participants will develop, refine, demonstrate, prototype, and launch or initiate transformative experiments. All participants are welcome. Leaders from city and regional governments will also be in attendance, alongside artists, business and other thought leaders. As the Deep Dive session on Day 2 will build on context from Day 1, either of the sessions on Thursday are a pre-requisite for Friday’s session.

PLEASE REGISTER TO THE COGNITIVE CITY HERE if you are participating: https://untitled.cognitive.city

Recommended Readings : Reading 1 and Reading 2 . 

EIT Climate-KIC  is the EU’s climate innovation agency, working to Accelerate the transition to a zero-carbon and resilient world by enabling systems Transformation.

Twitter: @ClimateKIC

Website: www.climate-kic.org

 

Related Untitled Agenda Themes : Reimagining the contract, Reimagining climate, Reimagining power, Reimaging human, Reimagining the economy

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New Metaphors by The Imaginaries Lab [US] // ART & IMAGINATION

Metaphors are central to how we imagine and describe the experiences and systems of everyday life, from climate to pandemic, governments to economies, education to care. Once we notice and think about the metaphors we’re using, it can prompt us to understand our situation better, but also to re-imagine, to use alternative metaphors to think in new ways. 

In this fun session we’ll be exploring how re-imagining, through new metaphors, can help us re-imagine the world, and create new ways of thinking and living. We’ll use the New Metaphors cards along with your own ideas and experiences to experiment with and generate ideas for transforming our imaginaries of some major issues for humanity and the planet. 

The session is run by Dan Lockton and Sanika Sahasrabuddhe from the Imaginaries Lab, an international research studio creating design tools to support people’s imagining, with the aim of more equitable socially and environmentally sustainable futures. Bridging research and practice, we work extensively with Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design and Tepper School of Business, and collaborate internationally with a variety of organisations in Europe and North America. 

Twitter handles: @imaginari_es and @soopersawnic

Website: imaginari.es 

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Futures frequency – Reimagine the future by Sitra [FI] // Experiment Workshop

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By 2030 our average carbon footprint should be significantly lower to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. We need to reimagine our Everyday lives, governance, businesses, work – every aspect of our lives to match the earth’s carrying capacity.

Futures Frequency is a 3 hour workshop developed by Sitra . It challenges our assumptions about the future, leads us to imagine preferred Futures and build actions towards it. We will come together to practice Futures thinking and challenge ourselves to see the possibilities for change making. The maximum amount of participants is 20. We will use Zoom and Miro in the workshop. 

Futures Frequency is a workshop method in progress and at the Untitled Festival we test its Prototype to help develop it. We welcome you to this pilot workshop that aims at using the workshop method as a tool to popularize Futures thinking and strengthen the link between Futures thinking and change making. The workshop will be targeted to people and organizations who are interested in these topics, but does not necessarily have any previous experience about them. The workshop is structured around three themes 1) Challenge existing assumptions about the future, 2) Imagine a preferred future, 3) Take action and shape the future. 

Our aim is to use the workshop method as a tool to popularize Futures thinking and strengthen the link between Futures thinking and change making. If we are going to succeed in the transition to a fair and ecologically sustainable society, we need more people to have agency and ownership and to feel that they can have an impact towards the future and to have skills to do that.

We would like to find partners who would be interested in developing the Futures Frequency method further with Sitra. Also, we will make thematic versions of the workshop, meaning Futures Frequency about climate, democracy, data etc, and would love to find partners who work with a specific theme and would be interested in developing these thematic versions with us.

Sitra is an active fund for the future who studies, researches and brings together partners from different sectors in open-minded Trials and reforms. Its future-oriented works are aimed at making Finland succeed as a pioneer of sustainable wellbeing. This session will be Hosted by Jenna Lähdemäki-Pekkinen and Liisa Poussa. Jenna works as a social foresight specialist in Sitra’s Foresight and insight team and Liisa works in Sitra’s Foresight team, producing long-term foresight data in anticipation of the future.

Twitter handle: @SitraFund ,@jennalahdemaki_,@Lillinen
Website: www.sitra.fi/en 

Related Untitled Themes:  Reimagining Human, Reimagining Climate, Reimagining Economy, Reimagining Work, Reimagining the Contract, Reimagining Cities

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Imagine a Radically Transparent and Traceable Government by TOKEN [EU] // CONVERSATION

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Imagine a society where government operations are totally transparent and processes traceable. Distributed Ledger Technology  (DLT), such as blockchain, is scaling upwards in public administration and is claimed to offer new radical possibilities to increase transparency and efficiency, while decreasing bureaucracy in public operations.

Will we have the ability to identify and monitor all the information and events associated with public policies? How would it affect people, governments and civil servants or institutional trust in the societies? During the conversation we will explore the possibilities, challenges and risks of transparency and traceability in public governance. 

The impact of transparency is tested through four experiments run by the TOKEN project, where public organisations are implementing DLT-based solutions in their services such as public grant distribution, mobility, smart city services and public procurement. 

Launched in January 2020, TOKEN – Transformative Impact of Blockchain Technologies in Public Services – is an EU funded project whose ultimate goal is to develop an experimental ecosystem to enable the adoption of Distributed Ledger Technology and to prove its value, via highly replicable Use Cases, as a driver for the transformation of public services. TOKEN has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Grant Agreement No. 825268. 

 

Twitter handle: @TOKEN_EU
Website: token-project.eu

Related Untitled Agenda Theme: Reimagining power

 

Image: TOKEN, token-project.eu

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Re-imagining an Anti-Racist World by Fred Brown [US] // CONVERSATION

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As the world becomes more interconnected than ever, slow adopters of collaborative problem-solving techniques run the risk of being left behind. By 2050, seventy percent of the world’s population will live in an urban corridor. With the confluence of population growth and the desire to live in urban corridors, there is an increased risk for vulnerable populations with the need for new, rapid development to accommodate growing communities. These populations can be supported by centering equity in the work.

Implementing an Equity Framework necessitates the understanding of equity, the practice of institutional assessment and the intention to address structural inequities because of systemic racism.

  • Equity means fair treatment, access, opportunity and advancement for all people. It requires the purposeful identification and elimination of barriers that have prevented the full participation of some groups.
  • Institutional Racial Equity assessments tease out tangible practices demonstrating adherence to principles and behaviors which foster systemic shifts in organizational culture. These lead to the cultivation of cross functional teams that outperform homogeneous ones.
  • Structural Racism is a system of beliefs and practices that, through omission or commission, move people to perpetuate damages against marginalized groups whether or not they intend to. Its foundation consists of social, economic, and political paradigms that require systemic thrusts to move institutions from optimization to cultivation of ecosystems, with human beings at the center.

The proposed ecosystems model seeks to promote racial equity analysis through the creation of new experiences within institutions, leaders, managers, staff, and customers. These would lead changes through innovation and producing viable wireframes that are agile and iterative. We believe that fostering ecosystems will lead to a shift from traditional systems to change models to co-designed models based on a Human Centered Design approach. Organizational and institutional leadership should be particularly involved in experimenting with this idea of ​​re-creating an anti-racist world.

Fred W. Brown Jr. is President & CEO of The Forbes Funds [TFF], a philanthropic organization focused in strengthening the management capacity and impact of community non-profits in the Pittsburgh area. The Forbes Funds (TFF) has a 35 year history of advancing well-being by helping human services and community-based non-profits build their management capacity, increasing the impact of their mission work.

In 2020, The Forbes Funds’ board approved a racial justice equity framework for all of TFF’s work. This framework includes investing in diverse leadership, increasing the capacity of minority-led organizations, and developing scenario planning and collaborative capacity of organizations within the region. Since the onset of COVID-19, TFF has held nearly 1,000 virtual meetings and engaged nearly 11,000 individuals in the region and across the state, Nation, and globe.

 

Twitter handle: @FredBrownPgh   @TheForbesFunds
Website:  https://forbesfunds.org/

Related UNTITLED Agenda Theme: REIMAGINING human, REIMAGINING power

 

Photo: Fred W. Brown Jr., twitter.com/fredbrownpgh

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Anthony Zacharzewski, The Democratic Society [BE] // ALLIANCE

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Anthony Zacharzewski hopes that Untitled will be a place where to reimagine democracy. What if a renewed participatory system allowed for a better inclusion of civilians?

Anthony Zacharzewski @anthonyzach
Founder and president of The Democratic Society,
A non-profit organization focusing on civic participation and new models of governance, www.demsoc.org

 

What could be reimagined now?

Thanks to the profound experience in the political and administrative fields, Anthony decided to found the organization with the aim of imagining a new type of democracy, which may lie in unusual places or is not connected to the classic 19th century schemes. To achieve this, he believes it is important to re-design the timing of participation within contemporary democracies, which often offer political elections every few years or online consultations in rare events (such as referendums).

Examples of recent system changes can be found in Belgium, where some administrative areas have set up assemblies for the representatives to meet four times a year, in order to discuss and better understand the problems affecting those regions. In a similar way, but on a different scale, Poland operates at city level. While we are still in the early days, it is a sign that democracies are at the beginning of a systematic change, which will inevitably force them to honor the pacts made for decarbonization.

What could the new democracies look like in ten years’ time?

Anthony’s hope is that issues such as climate change will not remain just temporary trends, but will increasingly include a human dimension, thanks to a renewed participatory system at the civil level. Therefore it is necessary to understand how to bring democracies closer to people’s everyday life by setting up new organizations, which promote collaborative and participatory actions within the population and its representatives. In the next ten years, it is expected and hoped that these ways of managing local communities will be consolidated and rooted in other global democracies as well. For example extra-European countries, such as African governments, which have seen fast growth in the last decade and offer tremendous potential.

Image: Anthony Zacharzewski, demsoc.org

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(c) Hugo Lefèvre

“What if we build a new world from the perspective of the marginalised?” by Tundé Adefioye [BE] // ART & IMAGINATION

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This was a session at Untitled Festival 2020.
As much of the Western world reckons with the contemporary realities of colonial legacies, this session invites participants to experimentally reimagine how the transformation of incumbent societal structures may profoundly impact historically marginalized individuals.

Reimagining an anti-colonial and anti-racist society includes understanding that the resources at the center of society today are resources that have been taken from individuals who have been oppressed. How can those resources now help the marginalized? The key focus of this session would be exploring how these very resources can be taken from the center to help, engage and mobilize the margins instead of always focusing on the center.

Furthermore, we will explore how these resources can be re-allocated in a way that does not take away so much energy from those who have been historically marginalized and oppressed. Given the ongoing pandemic and environmental issues we need to create safer, brave spaces that allow for innovation, healing and strengthening of communities that have been systematically under resourced and marginalized.

As a City Dramaturg at The Brussels City Theater, Tundé Adefioye will bring his artistic insights into this experimental session. Participants will be challenged to consider how to build new societies not based on colonial bureaucracies and how people can be truly served equally in a post-colonial world.

In addition to being a city dramaturg at KVS in Belgium, Tundé Adefioye is a founder of the Urban Woorden, a non-profit that uses poetry as a tool for youth engagement. Over the years Tundé has led and participated in numerous creative events across Europe, especially working with local communities to create spaces for diverse demographics to express themselves, empower themselves, and to feel inspired to be the best version of themselves. He has also given several lectures and speeches, notably including: a series of 6 guest lectures for the Luca Leuven School of Art, a keynote speech at the 2018 IETM plenary meeting in Porto Portugal, and a keynote at the Wales Arts International conference.

From 2017-2019, Tundé wrote, co-coordinated and implemented for the innovative EU Creative Europe project MindUrStep. In 2019, he made his directorial debut with Contact Theater Manchester, with the piece ‘Old Tools> New Masters ≠ New Futures’.  He sits on the editorial board of the VUB Poincaré book on Migration and Racism [2019-2020].

Related Untitled Agenda themes : Reimagining power, Reimagining human

Photo: Hugo Lefèvre (c)

 

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