Up_citying : four ecologies for an open design environment approach

The last 15 years have witnessed an important participative dimension of the bottom-up multidisciplinary content socially generated in the urban environment. This is due to the increasingly connected communication, which triggered the awareness on the relation between demographic and structural density, and the resource scarcity. Considering this we introduce a fourfold view lens that captures the changing openness of the urban environment, proposing the Up_Citying conceptual tool. The main questions we aim to address are: • how to engage citizens and designers in a long term connection with the city and its active citizenship movements • how to activate all the phases of the design process (from analysis to implementation and evolution of the results) in the cultural, digital and physical context of the city. The paper reports preliminary findings from 2 pedagogical Design School experiences (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University & The Domus Academy of Milano) from 4 perspectives: • the Space Ecology: framing built cities together with temporary, not-yet-legal, rethought or wished cities, which generate physical places, structures and voids; • the Identity Ecology: referring to the individuals, groups and communities, their culture, habits, fears and challenges in engaging and shaping the city and their collaborative behavior; • the Policy Ecology: planning the stakeholder networks and partnerships, facing the need to design strategic relations and interactions, enabling a meaningful dialog and alliances; • the Program Ecology: introducing the planning of interventions, activities and events, combining bottom-up and top-down strategies, that attract and involves the active citizenship designing new liveability.