Social
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For the first time, the Canadian Institute Without Boundaries, a cross-disciplinary educational program in sustainable design, organised a Sustainable Summer School in Belgium. Together with local design organisations, like Recentre, Z33, Flanders District of Creativity and MAD Faculty, they chose a peaceful green location in Limburg. Here an international group of design professionals gathered to brainstorm and work around certain subtopics in sustainable design, like water, food and public space. Around every subtopic a design team was formed, linked to two moderators and three external experts.

Together with designer Patrick Reuvis and architect Tim Prins, I was asked as one of the experts in a group that was developing a public space project in the city of Luik. The group received a manual from the Summer School that describes a series of methods – created by the Institute Without Boundaries – to deal with the public space project. The project addressed the lack of identity of a certain neighbourhood, called Saint-Gilles, in Luik. The neighbourhood was a lively area in the past, because of an small-scale artisanal industry that was situated there. Since a few years this artisanal activity disappeared, together with a lot of inhabitants. Therefore the project group wanted to put the people in the picture who still lived there and made the neighbourhood into a community.

The group started with an ethnographic observation of this particular part in Liege. They observed many houses in the neighbourhood that did not reveal any personality, with filthy facades, closed windows and curtains. Also they noticed that in the streets electricity cables were used to communicate via hanging shoes on them. The rumour was that this was a way for drug addicts to communicate among themselves. To trigger people in the neighbourhood to express why they liked Saint-Gilles, the group hung large banners in the street with the sentence “I love Saint-Gilles , because….”. As the picture shows, they got a lot of written comments on the banner by people living there. The observations and gathered material were translated in a collage of impressions, in the form of a mix of pictures and words. Later the group made a mapping of the area and linked their impressions to that map.

While the collage and mapping generated many ideas, one idea was elaborated on. It was a proposal to start an organisation that would plant interventionists seeds in the area in order to stimulate people to engage and make their presence in the area explicit. Clearly inspired by the rainy summer in Belgium, the design team defined one of these ‘seeds’ as a set of umbrellas. These umbrellas would be manufactured in the area, imprinted with pictures of the neighbourhood citizens. This local manufacturing was an explicit reference to the artisanal past of the neighbourhood. The locally created umbrellas would be collectively owned by the neighbourhood and installed in front of every inhabitant’s door. Every time a person needs an umbrella she/he collects it from the doorstep and puts it back when she/he does not need it anymore. Once a year, people would hang their umbrellas in the electrical wires – that were already used as a communication channel – to create a shelter under which the neighbours would eat and drink together. This constructive social exchange of identities via the umbrellas aims for more social cohesion between the neighbours and hopes that new creative initiatives will flourish as a result.

While the Luik design team engaged in an inspiring exploration of the neighbourhood in a few days time, it is of course a too limited period to generate sustainable results. The more important advantage of participating in the international format of the Summer School is, however, that it offers the design professionals an insight in working in international and cross-disciplinary set-ups. Plus, it provides them with an environment where they can learn to work with design research methods that have been experienced as successful in creating sustainable design projects. My hope is that this one-time organised format could be connected to, applied and integrated in a more systematic way in our present Belgian design research landscape. In this way we can learn from the past and year by year adapt the summer school to our local needs, of course in close dialogue with its rich international network. This could make the Sustainable Summer School format a sustainable learning experience in itself.

More information: http://www.recentre.org/sustainablesummerschool

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