Activating
About
Medborgerne is a citizen alliance working to unite stakeholders in Nørrebro and Nordvest (two districts in CPH area) on common grounds, so as to gain political attention by making unified demands as a community.
Tryg Nørrebro Station (Safe Nørrebro Station) was one of Medborgene’s first attempts to unite their members behind a common cause. Nørrebro station has been a victim of a large amount of construction work on the new metro lines.
However, no funds were set aside to make the area more livable. While the organization aimed to transform the area into a safer place, no ongoing physical actions were planned to change the status quo.
For this reason, the team approached Medborgerne to support the organization’s cause and get the opportunity to improve the livability of the area through a bottom-up approach and by activating temporary common spaces.
For this reason, the team approached Medborgerne to support the organization’s cause and get the opportunity to improve the livability of the area through a bottom-up approach and by activating temporary common spaces.
How might designers support the activation, interaction, and maintenance
of lively urban common spaces?
Process
To begin a process of empathy, activation, and re-appropriation of the space, we conducted a co-design workshop with Medborgerne’s campaign group to brainstorm on interventions in the public space, on small experiments which would transform the place during a specific period of time.
We organized a week of actions in order to intervene physically in the space, experiment with the activation of temporary “common spaces” and bring visibility to the cause.
With this purpose, we designed engaging tools to attract people and to get them in the mood for co-designing; enabling tools to share a common understanding about the object of conversation and lead the dialogue about future scenarios; collecting tools to collect qualitative and quantitative data in order to share, analyse and reflect on them.
During the week of the design experiments, approximately 150- 200 citizens were actively involved, engaging directly with the designers and space.
Outcome
The main delivery was an insight report, with detailed explanations of the experiments, crunched data of the interviews made with citizens as well as suggestions to Medborgerne.
To some extent, we ‘tweak’ the organization mindset, we helped Medborgerne to redefine their strategy and shift their campaign focus from ‘Tryg Nørrebro Station’ to ‘Min Nørrebro Station’.
The outcomes of the actions taken were:
Creating awareness about the space
Involving citizens to potentially be part of the decision-making Informing citizens about the non-existing plans for the area Gathering insights to be used for the development of the area Gathering tangible material to further support their campaign and action plan
Temporary activating liveable common spaces
Gathering actors with a stake in the area
Creating visibility of the association and their campaign
Our findings were used by the organization to support a political panel debate and by Out of Office to create tangible proposals for politicians.
