Eric Hunting on the Open Source Urbanism workshop at Wintercamp
I have asked Eric Hunting, our peer to peer architecture expert, to comment on the Wintercamp event, which I blogged about before, and which also had a workshop on open source urbanism. Here is his contribution.
Eric Hunting:
“Winter Camp is an annual conference event by the Institute of Network Cultures which this year was conducted in Amsterdam from the third to the seventh of March. One of those interesting intellectual gatherings where the arts, design, sociology, philosophy, and technology converge in a Gazpacho of sophisticated open exchange which, for some reason, only ever seem to appear today in the likes of the Netherlands and its immediate neighbors. This Winter Camp event featured a loose organization of artists calling themselves MyCreativity whose first-day topic for discussions and presentations was Open Source Urbanism. A run-down of that day’s presentations can be seen in this article from the Winter Camp 09 web site;
See the URL: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/wintercamp/2009/03/05/mycreativity-open-source-urbanism/
This was certainly one of those events this author has only dreamed of being involved in and it’s really encouraging to see such a random selection of creative people apparently who all seem to ‘get’ the nascent but key cultural changes now emerging in western society regarding our built habitat and our rights in it. Though focused largely on the issues concerning artists/designers and their participation and survival in a commercialized and politicized urban ecology, it is interesting to see a cognizance of the concept of an Open Source Urbanization where the urban habitat should exist as an open community-participatory construct and not a ‘product’ of distant econopolitical power interests. Particularly interesting to this author was the discussion of reconsidering Urban Utopianism of the early and mid 20th century. Once again we see reference to the work of Constance Nieuwenhuys and the recent convergence of architectural language with the language of information technology and a rediscovery by the contemporary design community of past utopian thought through the influence of that new digital culture.
Though the actual participants in this event seemed, from the articles on Winter Camp 09, to be bothered by a lack of coherence in their own exchange, this author saw in these reports a very clear expression of emerging Post-Industrial culture here, even if the participants did not refer to that. To paraphrase the late Terence McKenna, one can sense the roiling of the surface of the pond hinting at the imminent emergence of some protean form. If only such sophisticated venues of exchange were more widespread so as to coax things toward critical mass. But then, this may be a phenomenon today peculiar to the creative and intellectual cultures of contemporary Europe, as such sophisticated socialization and social-networking seems remarkably rare elsewhere.”