“I realized that basically the way that cities are being developed is a little broken.” — Thomas Ugo Ermacora, founder, Clear Village Recoded City examines alternative urban design, planning and architecture for the other 90%: namely the practice of participatory placemaking, a burgeoning practice that co-author Thomas Ermacora terms ‘recoding’. In […] more »
As 2015 draws to a close, I would like to share a number of reflections on how I see Clear Village developing in the years ahead. The first theme I would like to touch on is the relationship between participatory design and technology. Until now Clear Village has been viewed […] more »
In July we wrote about our view on the key messages from the Future of Places conferences in Stockholm. We talked about the emergence of new models of delivering public space in which newly emerging actors play a key role. With new technologies that facilitate these models becoming accessible to […] more »
In the beginning of July UN Habitat and Project for Public Spaces hosted a three-day conference on the Future of Places. The aim of the conference, and the two preceding ones, was to establish a set of key messages on public space making for the HABITAT III conference in 2016. […] more »
In my previous post I wrote about the increasing importance of measuring impact and how new technologies could support this. This post goes back to the practice of measuring impact and the methodologies for doing so. Five members of the CLEAR VILLAGE team, myself included, just completed the +Acumen “Making […] more »
Experimentation and prototyping, two design practices, can be powerful drivers to build trusting relationships with the local communities Clear Village works with. As we have experienced, building prototypes of the projects and involving the local communities early in the process helps in building meaningful relationships with the members of those […] more »
As described in a recent Working Paper by the Third Sector Research Centre, third sector organisations are making more and more of an effort to measure their impact on individuals, communities and society as a whole. Presumably, as is suggested in the Working Paper, this is a result of an […] more »
To launch the Voices series, I would like to discuss three concepts which lie at the heart of what we’re trying to achieve at Clear Village. They are, in a sense, the DNA of our organisation. I believe that they are also part of a wider trend in placemaking and […] more »
Human evolution does not roll itself out at fibre-optic speed. Quite on the contrary, we humans evolve extremely slowly with unrecognisable differences from generation to generation. Indeed many scientists across the board classify our neural structures still as a “stone-age brain”. What if it’s not so much that we are […] more »