PlaceCity

PlaceCity – Placemaking for Sustainable, Thriving Cities

Nabolagshager, in cooperation with a number of European partners, is part of the European project «PlaceCity, placemaking for sustainable, thriving cities» funded by the JPI Joint Programming Initiative. The main aim of the project is to advance placemaking as a new approach to creating better cities together and position placemaking as a fundamental measure for urban development and renewal in Europe.

The goals of the project are to:

• Establish and consolidate a multidisciplinary and trans-sectorial European placemaking network as an entity with the capacity to offer support and resources to local and national placemaking initiatives across Europe.
• Collect placemaking tools and methods in a European placemaking toolbox, test these tools in the partner’s cities Oslo and Vienna, and make these tools readily available to every city.
• Establish sustainable business cases for placemaking in partner cities. To achieve this, the consortium will work together with a combination of local partners (cities administrations, local communities, businesses, etc) as well as partners at a higher level (knowledge partners, governments, etc).

The Norwegian representatives in the project are Nabolagshager and the City of Oslo,  Agency for Urban Environment. International project partners include: the City of Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the NGO Eutropian, the architecture company Superwien Architektur, the Dutch placemaking company STIPO and Business Improvement Districts Belgium.

Oslo Case Study

Nabolagshager has established a collaboration with Hersleb High School, an inner-city school struggling with a bad reputation, low academic test scores, and where most students are first- or second-generation immigrants, mainly with East African backgrounds. It is one of the schools in Oslo with the highest drop-out rate and the long-term societal challenges related to their students are significant, including low degree of attractiveness in the labour market as well as limited life skills and networks to ensure employability as well as other key aspects of societal integration and participation.

The main goal of Oslo’s case study is to empower at-risk youth from Hersleb to create inclusive meeting places and activities in their schoolyard for neighbors and fellow students after school hours and on weekends. How? Through placemaking and creative participatory methods, the students themselves are identifying wishes and needs among students, teachers and neighbours, mapping limitations and challenges, and testing and implementing short-term actions that will contribute to create meeting places and activities for the entire neighborhood.

If you want to know more about the activities and events that students from Hersleb have carried out under the project, you can read more here: Pop-up Cafes as placemaking tool in Oslo, Park(ing) Day 2019 Oslo, Light Intervention at Local High School in Oslo and the pop-up furniture at H20.

For questions about this project, contact project manager Laura Martinez.