Roof Coliving: Participatory Cities

UrbanCommunity Experiment Recap (Maltepe & Istanbul, Turkey)

As Roof Coliving, we organized a Participatory Cities Program in collaboration with Maltepe Municipality and İstanbul Planning Agency. We aimed to open a space for youth to express their views and demands on participatory decision-making, making public spaces more equitable and sustainable by taking tangible steps and meaningful participation. We were questioning how to create just sustainability and climate-related dialogue environments that bring people together in the public space with sustainable design principles. Thus, our goal was to encourage and empower public spaces to transform them into spaces for dialogue that will raise awareness about the sustainability of Istanbul, potential threats, and possible solutions to create an environment for climate dialogue between local governments and young people. Besides, we empower youth with rights-based education in the context of the right to the city, and youth develop and implement functional, small-scale sustainable, and circular design interventions to the problems they identify regarding the Maltepe Infill Area.

First, we announced an open call for participants and organized a hybrid process of capacity building, community making, co-designing, community building, and implementation activities. We organized a Citizen in Place event with the help of municipalities, and we designed an interface called ‘FAÇAMAT’ -inspired by face-o-mat- to discuss urban issues with citizens, and at the end of this day, citizens chose the final design. Then we worked on the design proposals and discussed how to integrate other amazing design ideas into it for a couple of months.

We were excited because it was our first physical intervention in the city, and we were looking forward to discussing and raising awareness around sustainable and just cities through co-designed implementation.

We reuse leftover materials in the municipality’s storage and work with a fantastic carpenter, making implementation easier. And here is some reflections:

• We regret months between the co-design and implementation phases because it became harder for participants to arrange their time each week, and some of them lost their motivation. Thus, we will put co-design and implementation consecutively in upcoming projects.
• The week we installed the design was so rainy, decreasing the attention a bit.
• Luckily, we collaborated with the municipality in a good way, and they shared their storage with us to choose materials and support our improvised event with their activities for kids.
• Meeting amazing people in the Participatory Cities Program was such a win! We collaborated with some of them on many other projects and even tried to create a job opportunity in a place where we offered consultancy services.
• We used the design implementation in another city and are using the design daily now! It was an excellent opportunity to reuse materials to discuss and raise awareness of cities and sustainability in different contexts.

Finally, this community of experimenters is so valuable and supportive. It was great and inspiring to observe how they achieved their goals successfully in their projects. All three meetings enriched our project process and our decisions in Roof Coliving. I want to thank everyone for this journey!

This blog was written by our UrbanCommunity experimenter Sila Kartal, with light editing from us. This blog is part of a series of narrative reports on how the experimenters have used the UrbanCommunity micro-funds to support their communities through urban environmental justice.