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Day Three: Designing Social Participatory System Dennis Kaspori Presentation The presentation of Dennis Kaspori emphasized on the importance of cultural interventions as a means of community engagement. The speaker has developed and implemented a set of tools to enable the community to collectively shape the environment we are living in. He introduced some of the alternative organization models and tools that enable broad participation and a more inclusive form of urbanism. In 2006, Kaspori Launched the "Rotterdam Index (RIX)". RIX is an online and participatory information market that serves as a virtual monitor for neighborhoods. They created a stock exchange market of neighborhood. Every signed-up user would get a certain amount of virtual money. One could use the money to buy stocks in the market. It works similar to the real market, when people buy the stock, the price would rise, and vice versa. The stocks are in fact the neighborhoods in Amsterdam. So the price of a stock/neighborhood could be an index that shows the emotional value of certain neighborhood. The website also contains a news system, which is independent to the stock price. Players could put on different news about the neighborhoods and also rate the news posted on the board. The RIX provides a new value system on rating the community. It also creates an enjoyable ground for different communities to monitor their own neighborhoods. The second project is the "Face Your World Slotervaart", for which Kaspori cooperated with Jeanne van Heeswijk. They used a computer game to enable young people to become urban designers for their neighborhood. The youngster underwent a series of workshops, in which they used the computer software to design the park in their neighborhood. The software designed for this project is a visual based interface, it facilitated the youngsters to freely manipulate, combine and create a new vision of their living environment. Through this task the youngster were encouraged to get involve in shaping their living environment not just for now, but also in the future. The two projects are culture intervention for open dialogue, communication and collective action within a community. The RIX provides a platform for dialogues and the tools that can maintain such a dialogue and create the conditions for a more inclusive form of urbanism. "Face the World" seeding this sense of inclusiveness in the youngster, it also shows how education and neighborhood participation could be tied up in a concrete design assignment.
Biography Dennis Kaspori (Heerlen, the Netherlands 1972) is an architect and a founding member of The Maze Corporation, an office for research and design on issues related to urban renewal and housing. He focuses on the development of an engaged architectural practice that seeks new spatial solutions, alternative organizational models and tools that enable broad participation and a more inclusive form of urbanism. In 2003, the article “A communism of ideas, towards an architectural open source practice” was published in Archis. In 2005, he collaborated with Jeanne van Heeswijk on the Face Your World Slotervaart project in Amsterdam, which used a computer game to enable young people to become urban designers for their neighbourhood. In 2006, he launched the “Rotterdam Index”, an on-line and participatory information market that serves as a virtual monitor for neighborhoods. Websites: www.themaze.org; www.rotterdamindex.nl (in Dutch) |
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