Knowledge for All looks to revive local pockets of disused public space and, through community co-design, shape them into inter-generational neighbourhood hubs, centred around local knowledge exchange and play.
Local
Cyprus
Nicosia Municipality
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As an individual in partnership with other persons
First name: Era Last name: Savvides Gender: Female Nationality: Cyprus If relevant, please select your other nationality: Cyprus Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: 4 Anagenniseos street Town: Nicosia Postal code: 2413 Country: Cyprus Direct Tel:+357 97 607800 E-mail:studio@urbanradicals.com Website:https://urbanradicals.org/
First name: Era Last name: Savvides Gender: Female Nationality: Cyprus If relevant, please select your other nationality: Cyprus Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: 4 Anagenniseos street Town: Nicosia Postal code: 2413 Country: Cyprus Direct Tel:+357 97 607800 E-mail:studio@urbanradicals.com Website:https://urbanradicals.org/
The proposal looks to revive a disused public space provided by the Nicosia Municipality, into an inter-generational neighbourhood infrastructure that can be adapted and innovated according to local need. Centred around knowledge exchange and community authorship, the proposal looks to question what a library is, whose knowledge it preserves and how such a ‘social infrastructure’ can be adapted to best fit a hyper-local content. As such, it aims to reframe and expand on how education and learning are generated, proposing a new, contemporary model where learning can be nurtured across members of a local community fluidly and in relation to public space and the ‘commons’.
A series of community co-design workshops will explore the function of ‘the library’ and ‘play’ at different scales and programs, examining how forms of learning and exchange can continue to exist at a local level in a more accessible way, such as hybridised with a cultural programme (e.g. small stage for performances and local events), gardening (e.g. allotment garden) and multi-generational play (e.g. from skateboarding to backgammon). These parameters allow for a space which is open to all and aim to create an active space for the community.
By breaking down scales and hybridising what may appear to be an ‘institutional’ program, our model becomes a prototype for decentralising the idea of ‘the library’ and bringing it down to community level. Through critically evaluating and re-imagining a variety of uses which have been excluded from new and existing public realm typologies in Nicosia, the initiative is also able to examine frameworks for introducing users that have been largely neglected or marginalised, back into public spaces.
We believe the project can become a model for other EU communities, towns and cities where learning is brought to the individual, regardless of age and social background, which is especially important in making access to knowledge and learning more equitable.
Local knowledge exchange
Play
Community co-design
Adaptive re-use
New models for Accessibility
There are a number of reasons why this proposal is significant in the context of Nicosia.
Social Sustainability
First, it proposes and tests an expanded model of how learning can occur, through a focus on community building. It examines how co-design and a bottom-up approach can encourage local community engagement and a sense of ownership of a small public space, and how a learning hub can be activated via these activities which will surround it. These circular drivers become particularly important in adaptive reuse initiatives for Nicosia, in light of the increasing numbers of neighbourhood pocket parks which are disused, abandoned, vandalised or otherwise deemed as promoting anti-social behaviour within the communities they are meant to be serving.
Second, the project acts as a testbed for the design of small-scale knowledge-exchange community spaces for Nicosia and Cyprus at large, that can adapt to different hyper-local requirements, functions, and contexts. This sense of adaptability enables cultural production and know-how transfer to remain relevant to a diverse range of local communities. The principle of involving residents right from the planning and throughout the design stages, further ensures a sense of and commitment to running and managing these spaces, thus ensuring a lived and meaningful afterlife for the social and physical initiative.
Environmental and Material Sustainability
The initiative serves as a case study for new forms of sustainable urban development. It explores a circular mode of construction and upkeep that is informed by creative re-use of materials, local resources and economies A primary focus on locally reclaimed materials and upcycled aggregates, driven by ongoing practice-based research of the team (Urban Radicals, Eriksson Furunes + Khadka), will contribute towards significantly limiting the embodied carbon footprint of the project, while the revival of the disused park through landscaping and bio-divers
Cyprus has one of the lowest percentages of social participation in Europe*. The participation of the community in the design and maintenance of the park is the real asset of the project and opens up avenues to explore local narratives as expressed through available resources, craftmanship, planting and other forms of spatial activation which may relate to different cultures, social backgrounds and ages, thus generating a sense of ownership and belonging across diverse local stakeholders.
In terms of aesthetic, the vision for an inter-generational space for active and interactive learning carries an aesthetic which is derived from the innovative program that it carries: the hybridising of learning with activities such as play and participation in design (co-design). As such, the aesthetic outcome does not arise from a singular point of reference, such as that of the architect; instead, the initiative opens itself to the community, to add onto and contribute with their own individual or unique cultural and social references and embodied knowledge.
Maurice Merleau Ponty speaks of embodied knowledge, as the kind of knowledge that cannot necessarily be expressed in any other way than the act of performing this knowledge. The architecture of such locally ‘embodied’ knowledge will be developed from the local vernacular of Cyprus through making/building and be additive, unspecialised, and open-ended in nature. The amalgamation of interactions, exchange, learning and making of the space will therefore result in a rich aesthetic outcome which is multi-authored, open and welcoming for all.
Inclusion is a fundamental driver in the participatory development process of this initiative. Research on locals’ relationship, specifically the youth’s, to public space in Nicosia highlights their desire for a sense of belonging, welcome and community, yet it also indicates that adolescents often feel excluded from some of the public realm across the capital, for a variety of reasons. For young girls this exclusion is often exacerbated by concerns about their safety and antisocial behaviour.
The proposal addresses a real need in the contemporary urban planning of Nicosia to do with the shaping of these smaller ‘cells’, or cultural ‘nurseries’, of public space, such as neighbourhood pockets and parks which are exceedingly becoming disused by their local communities and abandoned.
With support from the Nicosia Municipality, focus groups with residents will be created, involving a wide and diverse portion of the local community demographic. This promotes inter-generational bridging, bringing the community together through participation and creating a sense of authorship over the project from a variety of different people, perspectives, backgrounds, gender identifications and age groups.
The initiative proposes a model where the research team assume the role of facilitators in the design process, whilst the community, who will eventually be served through the design process, is given the position of ‘expert’ of [their] experience, and plays a large role in knowledge development, idea generation and concept development.
Central to the project is the design of micro-programmes for the site that work together in promoting collaboration and knowledge-sharing within the local community. As such, the initiative extends the notion of the traditional ‘library’ and offers a space to meet, craft and create (through community-led workshops, activities and events), and acknowledge that “not only are there very diverse forms of knowledge of matter, society, life and spirit, but also many and diverse concepts of what counts as knowledge”. (de Sousa Santos B. (2014). Epistemologies of the south: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge.)
The objective is to create a live collaboration between the research team and the local community, supported by the Nicosia Municipality who will act as facilitators for site provision, community outreach and project delivery.
The exchange between design and local resident expertise will inform architectural design processes and production both from a community perspective and a technical point of view, investigating design through the lens of Community, Circularity and Craft.
The initiative starts at a regional level, in Nicosia district, looking to propose a participatory design model that can be finetuned for a diverse range of local activation programmes and has the citizen at its centre. If the initiative proves successful on the site which will act as a testbed, it opens up opportunities for the model to be adapted to different requirements of communities across Nicosia and Cyprus, as well as other European countries looking to activate hyper-local pockets of public space for local residents.
The initiative aims to create a framework for rethinking the way we design for learning and play; as well as rethinking how knowledge exchange can happen and be stimulated, with a sense of spontaneity and ‘looseness’ which are able to go beyond the formalities of an ‘institutional’ classroom or a singular discipline.
Our main expertise in terms of defined disciplines we bring to the table is education, urbanism, architecture, landscape, design-for-play, material research, social and environmental sustainability. We are also partnering with expert collaborators who are cultural geographers as well as architectural historians and theoreticians of the built environment as well as key workers from the Nicosia Municipality and affiliate institutions who work directly with community engagement on a local level.
Ultimately, the aim of the initiative is to work under a collaborative framework with different experts who currently operate in isolation from each other and, along with the local community, to create a fresh model and a vision for new, public, spaces for learning.
The initiative looks at learning, and spaces for learning, with the aim of generating a new, fluid, dynamic and interactive model which is hybridised with ‘meantime’ activities such as play and gardening and which can integrate different age and cultural as well as social groups. Our particular focus of disused public playgrounds and parks in Nicosia focuses on smaller communities and aims to provide an overarching model or strategy for these growing number of abandoned community spaces to be reactivated and, with further support from the municipality, become useful pieces of public infrastructure.
The context of Nicosia, Cyprus, is ideal for the project as it can be understood as a small microcosm of what is currently being observed across Europe, in relation to questions concerning cultural migration, access to knowledge, equity and inclusivity in public space. As such, this small, low-risk prototype can be tested and, if successful, scaled-up to other contexts, suburban, rural and even internationally to other members of EU state.
The team aims to document the findings and process and compile an online open-access digitally accessible archive or guide for the learning and how-to, where this knowledge can be transferred applied and implemented in different contexts. We are interested to see how this project can take a wider international scope while document the localities and particularities of each context which make it unique and different, as well as identifying common threads that have to do with learning, public space and well-being in our cities.
The process of constructing and making each of these small spaces for learning can become a small innovation project in itself, also harnessing local skill, knowledge and technology - which are all to be shared on a common platform we would like to establish with international partners as the project grows and expands.
The methodology builds on principles of collaboration found in cultural practices of mutual support. These are mechanisms for collaborative work that can be found in most cultures around the world, where different forms of values and knowledge are expressed, deliberated and acted upon by a community working together towards a shared goal.
1. Learning
2. Questioning
3. Making
4. Concept
5. Design
A 3 week on-site co-design programme involving the research team, members of the community and local partner institutions will be structured around the iterative stages of 1. Learning 2. Questioning and 3. Making.
The team and community will have to address the question about knowledge and spaces for the preservation and sharing of knowledge. To reflect on this critically, the model calls for both the perspective of the team’s research architects and academics (as outsiders) and of the community members and local stakeholders (as insiders).
The workshops will look at how we can collectively learn from the situation as it is now (week 1), question how we would like it to be in the future (week 2) and to make something that suggests how we can transform the situation (week 3).
Each week will consist of three two-hour long workshops held with the community in the afternoon after work hours. The workshops will be organised with 20 residents at a time, working closely with the project team and their expert collaborators.
The initiative’s team will be designing the activity for each session in-between the workshop days, to ensure that it responds to the output of the previous session and will take a further 3 weeks to finalise the design.
6. Build
The project will be delivered with the support of the municipality. Training workshops will transfer basic maintenance knowledge and spatial activation know-how to residents, from which an organic framework for the aftercare of the space can begin to develop, alongside site maintenance and care from the municipality.
Design for social impact is an ever-important agenda in contemporary urban planning. Access to learning, equity and inclusivity in public infrastructure and space is an issue that still needs to be widely addressed. Access to knowledge is often directly linked to institutions and physical buildings of the state which may be interpreted as austere or hard to enter, especially for new residents, migrants or people on the margins of communities and cities.
Our initiative proposes a model where ‘the library’ is decentralised and hybridised with softer activities, placed in small pockets of the public realm, which can be accessed by the community as well as by people who are not directly affiliated with larger institutions. Our model is based directly on locality and mutual support, or synergies from people ‘on the ground’, and can be successful by empowering locality, and giving it voice and authorship in the shaping of a shared space.
This project adds to a globally growing body of work that puts community needs, knowledge, and resources at the centre of architectural and urban planning practice. The proposal builds on these design models and explores the impact of libraries for the communities whose knowledge is preserved, and what the building of such a social infrastructure might mean for a locality. By strengthening inter-generational bridging and promoting circularity and craft, it aims to create a prototypical expression of what a public library and playground infrastructure at a community level could look like, with the potential of creating a community co-design model which can be replicated both locally as well as globally, in other local contexts.
The proposal is grounded in ongoing practice-based research by Cyprus architects Era Savvides, Nasios Varnavas (Urban Radicals) with collaborators in Norway (Dr. Alexander Eriksson Furunes), the Philippines (Sudar Khadka, Jr) and the UK (Dr. Paolo Zaide) bringing their European and international multi-award winning expertise as educators and architects in sustainable construction and adaptive re-use initiatives, as well as in creating participatory design learning spaces for the marginalised and those in need or urgency.
Particularly relevant to highlight is the work of collaborators Eriksson Furunes and Kadha, who over the last 12 years have worked in different cultures around the world (Vietnam, China, Philippines, Brazil, Norway and India) to understand how these platforms for collaboration offer spaces for learning and for different forms of knowledge, oral and often tacit, which can only be transferred by members in a community working together over time. The examples in their attached portfolio and website show how their work in different communities has revolved around the idea of knowledge production and where the process of working together has questioned and re-define what these spaces could be, demonstrating in practice, and having been awarded for, a long term model of engagement and relevance to the affected communities.
Development Plan
1. Research
1. Selection and procurement of suitable site with municipality support
2. Community outreach
3. Research into local opportunities for material reuse and aggregates
2. Participatory Design
4. Public briefing
5. Co-design Workshops (3 wk - Learning, Questioning, Making)
6. Design Package delivery (3 wk)
7. Securing key material suppliers and makers
8. Planning permission
3. Build
9. Construction and landscaping works
10. Finishing (mosaic, ceramic works) and minor landscaping works (planting and gardening) by municipality and local residents
11. Community training for upkeep
Cyprus has one of the lowest percentages for adults to gain access to education at later stages in life as well as general access to public libraries and knowledge.
By using co-design as a methodology and by empowering the community, we are aiming to include everyone in our process and generate a sense of agency and action which is both by and for the people.
Through our previous research and experience as well through this initiative, we aim to look at learning outside traditional modes of education (i.e. the classroom) and go beyond age groups and cultural backgrounds. The proposal and its hybrid approach allow for a participatory process of learning, defining and making, which in turn generates a space where ‘the many’ can meet and ‘the other’ can be heard. In a way this model produces a discursive and multidisciplinary approach towards collaboration where learning may be defined as lifelong, skill sharing and what we champion as ‘mutual support’.
These horizontal structures that we aim to put in place, both in the design, construction and operation of our proposal, produce a rich and multi-layered testbed on which to implement the European sustainability competence framework, where education and knowledge-sharing come together in a participatory live project. Each member of the community therefore assumes value as an ‘expert’ to this task, and is expected to contribute with their unique knowledge, expertise, and bring a level of agency to the project, vital to the success of the initiative.
This model will remain open to other educators, researchers, or academics to enter and contribute to the discussion, with the possibility of further refining this model when taken on and implemented elsewhere even outside the context of Cyprus, within larger built environments, cities, suburban or even rural areas.
