#egatalks

A digital, cultural and physical creative environment

Three or four years ago I worked a lot with Medellín in Colombia. It used to be the world’s most dangerous city and now  when we ended, it actually became known as the world’s most creative city by Wall street journal. Right now I’m trying to set up the first incubator and science Park in Nigeria.

Yes there is a there’s a physical component to future knowledge environments. I think that three components are actually important.

1. It’s how do you create a knowledge atmosphere over the internet? 2. How do you create a culture and community? Around the the place that it was supposed to be the hot spot or the place where all the vibes starts going and so forth. 3. The physical environment itself

1. A digital environment

We are much more on the move. We’re much less dependent on place. Much more working with knowledge structures and knowledge architecture architecture. The most valuable thing today is probably software and you can’t touch that. It’s like all over. Maybe it’s found, but it’s somewhere else. It’s not physical.

Those things are becoming more and more valuable. That’s also the way we work more and more. You as an architect. It is your ideas and abstracts constructions that is the most valuable actually.

It’s interesting now for example when I work with Nigeria and also the same a little bit with Columbia. That the internet is not as good as we’re used to in the Western world. So you can’t use all the tools that you used to. So you have to learn how to communicate internationally, were a lot of the growth happens, with other tools. So these small kind of basic things becomes really important.

2. A community culture

The second part I think is culture. More and more, I think that you can build buildings. But if you don’t have a community manager or an event team or some kind of a soul being put into that physical body, then it won’t work.

The more you can build in ”the community presence” or even put in the budget that you should have people working with this over a long time. I think that would be great.

Events is one way of spreading values and also attracting attention and and making people meet each other in new ways. Under new themes and discussing new things. That makes them inspired and gets  them closer together.

So I think events is a big thing for a community manager. One thing that they had here at ”Media Evolution City” where I work, that I really like is ”Dine with a stranger” You just get invited to a lunch with ten people. You know none of them. It’s not a big thing. Yet pretty easy to to do. It’s great!

I think, you can usually just go into a place and you can feel if it’s working or not. What interests me is actually how do you get the vibe? Part of is definitely physical. A lot of it is also creating the community, the happenings, the events, the meeting places. How you create that, is just as important.

In Nigeria we were doing it outside of the building. You can use the streets as well. You don’t get as much of a concentration, but you get a lot of more marketing. People are starting to understand that. There’s music on on there? On campus? Over there? I’ve never been into that house. What is happening?

3. A physical environment

People haven’t really understood the changes behind how we work. I’m very seldom at my office. I guess that’s more and more common.

That demands a lot more of a flexibility when it comes to building structures. How to pay rent. On the other hand, maybe I’m not so problematic when it comes to discussing price, if I get a flexible deal.  Price is not the most important thing. The flexibility is the most important thing.

The basic things that I think is very crucial for a creative environment. It’s actually the balance between inspir tion and function.

If it becomes too much inspiration, it becomes more like an ”ad-agency cool” But you can’t really work there.  And if you only don’t do cubicles all creativity will die. It’s always some kind of balance between inspiration, even provocation, maybe some kind of history that you can be proud of.

But also like traces of innovation that has been going on. When we did service around what people thought would be a creative environment. Something that I didn’t think about myself was, that people loved when you can find like, a whiteboard where there were still notes or prototypes laying around that you can start fiddle with and stuff like that. Yes, that’s some of the reflections I have.

1. How do you find a good Internet solution for knowledge?

2. How do you find a community building part of it?

For me there’s two key elements to the sustainable city.

There is people. It’s all about people living together in cities if that doesn’t work then the cities won’t work so you need to be creating good livable cities for people

Secondly you have to create sustainable cities whatever that means in the local context. You can’t say that one solution that will work in Denmark will work in Rio de Janeiro, Budapest, Cape Town etc. You have to find a solution for each local context.

You can then take what works in one city and adapt it to another city and that’s what we do here at Climate-KIC where I work. We are an EU-funded organization to help reach the two degrees of warming.

We’ve said that cities are the key to this. This is where a lot of the activity is happening and a lot of energy use is happening. So how do we then help and go in to make sure that what’s happening in Madrid can become an interesting solution for Cape Town or San Francisco?

How do we get that knowledge spreading quickly because if we just let the markets do this, things will go too slowly. This is where the cities have a very important role, the national governments and the private sector. This is where we go in and help to coordinate. For us a key to sustainable cities is to show off a well-functioning solution and go out and inspire people on a lot of different levels.

It inspires me when we make a difference. When you can see people being happy and people taking ownership of their areas. Going out and wanting to make a difference themselves.

I think some of the best examples are when you find a big energy system. To be honest people don’t care about it, they just want their house to be warm. But when they can go in and find out. What is my role of this? What is the company’s role in this? What is the city role in this? When you see these things happening and you actually see that change happening, much quicker. That is incredibly interesting.

Quite often we see it’s easy to do the technical side of things. The technical solutions are there. We have brilliant architects who can do beautiful houses where people can live. We have urban planners doing beautiful cities with good energy systems.

But it’s when you get to the next levels, asking yourself, how do you implement this? This is where it becomes becomes technical, that’s where I find it very inspirational. To say: Okay we can actually make this work.

If we put these people in the room and set the context right and then help to support them afterwards. Then all of a sudden you will have not only the mayor making a visionary statement, but also the people at the ground level going in and supporting this and getting all the elements working together.

I think that’s critical because without that it just becomes either a vision from the top which is difficult to implement. Or small projects which don’t have an impact.

I think it’s very important to have that balance. Between people having a good city and a sustainable city. Because if you go out and make the perfect sustainable city. It’s not necessarily going to be a success. Or if you make the perfect city for people. It might end up having five degrees of global warming because it’s a terrible city. We need to get that balance right.

Very often we get the question. This is great it works over here, but it’s never going to work in our local context. Why should I be making a difference when it’s not gonna happen? So this is why we focus very often on how it makes an impact locally.

Then we can leave the big climate change discussion and focus on how can we make your local environment better?  So  that you will be getting a better better district or a better neighborhood and at the same time making sure that those climate change and the co2 reduction become elements in that.

Taking point of departure in people’s everyday lives or companies organizations. How do we help improve that? To get the bigger goal.

One of the best examples I think is water. It’s very tangible. It’s very important at the moment. Some cities don’t have enough of it and some have too much. When we see the way a lot of our systems are set up, it’s just plain stupid. That we put everything in pipes and then we mix it with with  sewage water and then we clean that. We spend a lot of energy doing that that. It makes no sense. But there are systems where you can divide these things up. Technically it makes sense. It’s still just pipes in the ground.

What we have worked with is how do you keep the water in an area? Water is an attractive quality. So instead of just saying okay this is a technical thing, that we have to hide away. How do we create lakes and wetlands systems which create value for the local area? If you create an identity and at the same time work with utility companies.

We have to make sure that water is clean enough so that when it goes into the streams it doesn’t pollute. Getting all those technical things working. But when people see the system they still see a beautiful wetland system.

When I presented this for the local area we worked with. Their focus was not on if we could help with water and do the aqua filter levels. They asked if they could kayak up and down the system. Fist I said ”That’s not the point” But after a while we realized that taking a kayak in the water, was important for people. That connection, then meant that people starting focusing on the water quality? Can I go fishing? Can I go swimming in this?