Generative Commons Living Lab

gE.CO Living Lab aims at creating a platform for bringing together and supporting formal groups and informal communities of citizens who manage fab-lab, hubs, incubators, co-creation spaces, social centres created in regenerated urban voids. These innovative practices are based on sharing and collaboration between citizens and may establish a new partnership between Public Institutions and local communities.

In particular, trying to find a solution to both the increasing number of urban voids as well as to the needs arising in the population many local communities have started to set forth paths of urban regeneration alternative to gentrification, grounded on community-building, inclusivity, accessibility, environmental sustainability and fulfilment of fundamental rights. These experiences are defined by the equal, open and participatory management of urban space that at the same time generate new relationships and spaces: these are called generative commons.

Generative commons are to become an alternative model of economic growth, representing a local solution to face global transformations. The overall objective of gE.CO Living Lab is to promote generative commons and to enhance their  potentials, by providing citizens and public institutions with the necessary support, without at the same time compromising their participatory and informal character.

gE.CO Living Lab will achieve this objective through the following specific sub-objectives:

1. It will bring together generative commons using a digital platform for collaboration. The gE.CO platform will map citizens’ initiatives as well as those public institutions engaged in new forms of partnership with local communities. These will be connected in a network that will promote the exchange of best (digital) practices and legal solutions.

2. It will evaluate a group of pilot cases composed by generative commons and municipalities in order to understand which socio-economic, technological and legal factors make self-organized experiences sustainable and public institutions helpful for their development.

3. It will use the results of the evaluation for scaling upt sustainable generative commons and innovative local policies: best practices, digital solutions (in the form of a toolbox) as well as legal solutions will form the gE.CO Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Package through shared, public and open access contents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Open Lab Athens in gE.CO:

Open Lab Athens will specifically focus on bringing together digital tools that promote citizens’ participation and community building. Emphasis is laid on processes of accessible and inclusive communication, identification of issues of concern for the community and collective undertaking of mundane operations of maintenance -see, for instance, our first, usability workshop for gE.CO tools.

Departing from this axis, Open Lab Athens is interested in the uses of the law in the context of urban commons, especially in what regards housing- see the workshop we co-organized with Goethe Institut in February 2020.

Moreover, Open Lab Athens will lead a strand on social inclusion that comprises three axes: increasing accessibility of ICT tools and gE.CO platform; designing processes and digital tools that enable and promote the equal and equally visible women’s participation in urban commons; and designing of participatory workshops and tools for the inclusion of other underrepresented groups.

Within this context, the gE.CO team of Open Lab Athens is launching in March 2020 a project on feminist infrastructuring in a female migrant community in Athens.

The gE.CO team of Open Lab Athens is comprised by Dr. Hara Kouki and Yannis Efthymiou.

Consortium

Keep up with gE.CO Living Lab by visiting the project’s website.