Agile Spaces for Culture
Urban gardening proposes alternative uses of spaces by occupying left-over slots and by offering stage to other temporary activities. (Photo by Russ Grayson)
How could temporary and shared uses of spaces be a resource to people living in a city? From the initiative of the Cultural Affairs of the City of Tampere, there was a small seminar held some weeks ago around this theme. Main goal of the afternoon was to bring together owners of spaces and active grass-roots makers of culture. We wanted to discuss what benefits there could be for all parties from new concrete experiments of uses of spaces and how we could proceed in practice here in Tampere.
As a start we had three talks to inspire the conversation. Eeva Berglund, a researcher who has focused on citizen activism movements, brought us greetings from London. There is a huge property development boom happening in central districts. Big blocks of high buildings are realized at once and in large units. City spaces are becoming generic look-a-likes of each other. Prices of living in downtown are becoming so high that average income people have no possibility to live there. All this has fueled varied citizen activism movements. People protest, but they also start to do their environments themselves, just to have diversity and quality. Community gardens pop up. You can see outdoor pizza-ovens everywhere. Left-over buildings are renovated to become cultural centers. The situation in London shows us how important and powerful the grass-roots actors can be in making human-scale and livable spaces, when market-led building sector is incapable of doing so.
The gravity of situation in London brings common people to join the movements. They might have never before had any activist background and have even been very sceptic towards this way of action. It is both a challenge and a gift to the movements themselves. How to act together as a strongly diverse group? Motives are sometimes contradictory. But could this diversity bring new skills to movements? Activism can happen also inside institutions, trying to change its practices. Or an institution can actively take part in experiments. A small business, like a corner shop, can be a city activist. How to get rid of old borders, how to recognize the co-maker, where there earlier was an opponent conceived?
Mushrooming showcased us a platform of how to share spaces. I introduced the story of our network of coworking spaces. The agility of space sharing and variety of cultures that this agility supports have grown as the network has developed. Focus was on different practices and digital tools that by experience enhance the interaction in-between coworking spaces and that enable out-renting of working posts. There clearly are different space sharing ecologies, kind of different communities that concentrate on sharing a specific type of a space, like spaces for working or spaces for doing sports. This kind of separation makes it easy for a citizen to find a space needed for special activity. But from the point of view of the person renting out a space, it will be a big hit when the different platforms will start to communicate and you could enlist your space to many forums and for example bookings would automatically not overlap.
Tulli Block Party is an open street festival organised the second time this year. For a day it turns a backyard in the center of Tampere to everyone’s living room. (Photo by Tulli Block Party)
It is crucial to build trust in between alternative space users and those who rent spaces out. Many premises that lie forgotten could find their users by experimenting different temporary activities. Hukkatila in Tampere is an association that nowadays is recognized as a trustworthy grass-roots maker. Many other could be recognized the same way. By temporary cultural happenings they challenge rooted practices. Their participation in projects like Takaterassi or Tulli Block Party give us imagination of what city could be. Mikko Kyrönviita shared us his experience on this work. He sees that experimenting with temporary uses produce unique places, especially when done step by step as open co-creation with everyone interested. According to him from this kind of local rootedness many forms of sustainability can truly be born.
Written by Elina Alatalo, Mushrooming activist and urban researcher
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