Raise the Hammer

Here are a few avenues that community groups & motivated individuals in our city could use as reference in developing a framework for community engagement viz. revitalizing King Street East between Kensington Ave and Wellington Street.

A: Crowdsourcing Urban Design Solutions

-- Crowdsourcing Urban Planning?

This video discusses six forms of crowdsourcing: 1. Distributed data collection 2. Soliciting design solutions 3. Collective intelligence 4. Peer production of public goods 5. Collective Intelligence Genome 6. "Open Innovation" technology

Articles on Crowdsourcing urban design solutions:

--By the City/For the City

--Improving NYC through Crowdsourced urban Design

--The Future of our Cities-Open, Crowdsourced and Participatory

--Crowdsourced City-(a Syllabus)

--IdeaScale - channel discussions to increase citizen engagement

B: ProBono Design Services

Hamilton has more than 50 professional design firms in our region. The forgotten parts of our city could benefit immensely if our professional design firms were approached by leading community groups to adopt the following models which have already achieved phenomenal success:

-- The One Percent is a program of Public Architecture in the US, which connects nonprofits with architecture and design firms willing to give of their time pro bono.

Potential impact: If every architecture professional in the U.S. committed 1% of their time to pro bono service, it would add up to 5,000,000 hours annually - the equivalent of a 2,500-person firm, working full-time for the public good.

Informed by the examples of other professions and groups, ranging from the Community Design Collaborative of AIA Philadelphia to the Taproot Foundation , The One Percent program is focused on professionalizing pro bono design across many categories including Arts, Civic, Community, Education, Health and Housing.

-- Architects for Peace

Architects for Peace aims to provide an alternative forum for debating political, environmental and social issues in the professional urban context.

The reasons for providing probono services are many and include:

• The perceived and real social divide in the use of architectural services
• The perceived notion that architecture is dispensable and deals only with aesthetics
• The public’s general unawareness of the impact of architecture, urban design and planning in the way we use and live in our cities
• The need of our arch-peace professionals to assist in the creation of more democratic, fair and better cities for all, wherever we are based
• The need to realise that these services would provide mutual benefits and that as part of the society we live in, we all suffer or rejoice from urban wellbeing.

-Mahesh P. Butani