2012 Architecture & Planning in Times of Scarcity Reclaiming the Possibility of Making
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Item Open Access A Manifesto(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Maci, Giulia; Blust, Seppe de; Kustermans, ClennWe must re-evaluate traditional concepts of planning. As planners and human beings we are used to growth. Growth seems (or seemed) to be natural, because there is coherence with our own lives: you are born, you grow, you sustain, you shrink, you die. But in urban terms today de-growth or shrinking does not necessarily mean decline or dying. We need to accept the fact that cities cannot and will not grow like they used to do. Moreover, in times of scarcity and shrinkage we can (at last!) focus on the parts that already exist. We must react to rapid urban transformation. It seems necessary to go beyond theories and try practical actions to address concrete urban issues. It is time to get out our laid-backed offices and to leave our desks, digital aerial maps and other tools. Monitoring and evaluating real daily life are fundamental in our job to learn from the experiences and to readjust theories and strategies. An urban planner experiences local struggles personally. In East Germany, for example, a vast amount of cities is shrinking. Instead of trying to find ideas for new growth in the East, there is rather a need to fulfil local needs. And instead of building new suburban neighbourhoods (market-based thinking) and breaking down high-rise areas, planners could focus on reshaping the high-rise areas into positive and well-used places by new concepts. Enter the area, experience it melancholically and do something with it.Item Open Access Acknowledging complexity and continuous urban change(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Sengupta, Ulysses; Cheung, EricCurrent practices of urban planning and spatial design have shown an inability to cope adequately with, and successfully intervene in the complex spatio-temporal nature of our cities. With current trends of urbanisation indicating increasing speed of change, the European Urban Summer School event was an opportunity to engage young planners with complex systems and digital tool based approaches aimed at the growing necessity to address temporal and morphological urban systems. Non-deterministic computational modelling techniques simulating complex urban territories in states of rapid change provide the potential to observe, comprehend and test the relative possibilities of spatial and policy based interventions while working with unknown futures and trans-scalar influences (Sengupta, U. 2011). In order to situate spatial design methodologies within current discourses in planning theory, the wide existing gap between theory and practice in urban planning, i.e. between rationale spatial implementation and communicative theoretical intention, must be addressed (De Roo et al. 2012). We believe the potential for bringing spatial and social issues back together, and thus addressing the space of action, lies in the ability to understand the forward projected impact of political, spatial and regulatory interventions on the identifiable trajectories and trends of existing socio-spatial evolutionary conditions.Item Open Access Architecture & Planning in Times of Scarcity Reclaiming the Possibility of Making(AESOP, 2012) Iossifova, DeljanaUN-Habitat, represented by its Central European Office in cooperation AESOP in September 2010 organized the 1st European Urban Summer School (EUSS) for young planning professionals. The host was the Wrocław University of Technology, Poland. The topic of the EUSS was Heritage and Sustainability. Izabela Mironowicz was the head of the school while Krzysztof Mularczyk acted as UN Habitat Coordinator. The 2010 EUSS took as its starting point the fact that urbanisation is a global process, yet it has left a particular legacy in European cities. Students and tutors with diverse backgrounds congregated from all over Europe and beyond in a central European city to gain a better understanding of urban change. Reconciling heritage with development was the challenge to achieve a more sustainable urban future. ‘Sustainability’ was conceived here as a balance between historic legacy, regeneration and citywide urban transformation. Wroclaw, the host city generously provided the empirical setting to test these assumptions, to verify their validity through international comparisons, and to offer young professionals the opportunity to elaborate interventions towards a more sustainable urban future.Item Open Access Changing conditions – changing our role(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Maci, Giulia; Blust, Seppe de; Kustermans, ClennAfter briefly discussing the changing context of urban planning, the article focusses on our experiences in Bromley-by-Bow. During the summer school we had an in-depth visit to this East London neighbourhood. Our colourful experiences are then put in a manifesto, which can help young urban planners understand their jobs. To arms! Times are changing fast. The economic crisis points out the risks and the limits of our current planning system. In times of scarcity it becomes inadequate for, let’s say, three reasons. First, traditional planning is characterized by a strong hierarchical structure, with a promoter that coordinates the actions of different urban players. This model needs a high availability of scarce public resources (financial, human resources and knowledge) and lacks the needed transparency and democracy in today’s multi-actor society. Second, traditional zoning as a tool to regulate land use is not able to manage the emerging dynamics of the transformation of the territory. Its ‘catch 22’ between the necessary flexibility for new win-win situations on the one hand and the stringent framework to guarantee spatial quality on the other hand leads to stagnation. Third, the complexity of society is growing. A growing diversity and social inequality puts society under pressure. Space and spatial planning interact in this process by putting socio-spatial incongruence in focus and by making social structures spatially permanent.Item Open Access Changing contexts and visions for planning: the case of madrid central area(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Franchini, TeresaHow to cope with the concept of scarcity as an issue for planning? What does it imply for a traditional planning system based on a set of instruments aimed at guiding the city in the long term? To what extent does a master plan have the capacity to deal with the issue of scarcity? How can these plans be successful - or not - in this attempt? In which way does the changing economic and social context influence the type of planning pushed forward by the authorities in charge of the matter? This article tries to give some answers to these questions by exploring the interplay which exists between the overall economic context, the dominant vision in planning, and the planning instruments produced for cities affected by changing circumstances, drawing on the master plans designed for Madrid during the last 30 years. The article is structured around these three key aspects, with the aim to extract some lessons from this experience. The laboratory used to explore these questions is the central district of the city. It is an urban realm to which all the approved planning instruments have given a special treatment to improve a traditionally deprived area, whatever their supportive vision.Item Open Access Costa de la Ruina: Neglected places at the Costa del Sol all the way from Malaga to Manilve(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Seyfarth, SebastianThis chapter deals with the topic of the current situation of hundreds of empty and abandoned construction sites and their relations to their environment. This phenomenon has its roots in the time of mass construction, which was followed by the global financial crises. Nowadays these places are neglected and avoided by local residents and city municipalities. In particular, this paper is going to refer to the example of the Costa del Sol area in the south of Spain as the main case study. Since the 1950th this area in southern Spain experienced a tremendous urban growth in providing settlements and infrastructure for Mass Tourism. Rapidly it became one of the most travelled holiday destinations for Europeans. Short term vacation tourism, as well as long term and constant residents from Spain and abroad, bought a 2nd or summer resident home at the coast. Hence the major part of the developments comprises residential buildings. Most of these developments especially inland, prioritised time efficiency of construction, not quality of the structures. The developments have almost no reference to the history or identity of that area. This creates the feeling of being in a copy-paste-mass-production-urbanisation, with fences and borders. There are isolated settlements, unrelated to their surrounding and even other neighbouring regions. The levelling of the topography to establish infrastructure for roads and houses caused big scale nature destruction and landscape sealing. These developments continued until the Spanish property bubble burst in 2008 due to the global economy and financial crisis. Since then plenty of ‘in progress’ buildings stopped in construction and still remain in that very situation as they came to halt four years ago. Some of the developments could continue but even these structures are empty today. Together with other vacant developments they are generating ghost towns as though nobody ever lived there. What is going to happen with that kind of abandoned and neglected urban obstacles, when there is no money to continue, to transform or to destruct? How can one interact with the residential building typology that appears along the coast and has become part of Costa del Sol’s identity?Item Open Access Culture hungers: new appetites for contemporary cities(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Maioli, SerenaDysfunctional abundance. The city is an egg (Price, 1961). The ancient city, hemmed in the physical line of the walls and made up of an historical core, is a boiled egg: we are able to distinguish the borders and its density. During the centuries of industrialization and demographic boom, the city begins to develop itself beyond the walls, taking the form of a fried egg: the periphery is born. The city centre, up to now solid on the core, loses its magnetic force and infects itself with an urban magma which floods everything dissolving hierarchies: the modern city become scrambled.Despite Price’s model, our cities entered a new phase, one in which growth and the blending of centres and periphery brings about a new phenomenon of erosion and blurring: it causes the emptying of entire urban parts, towards a porous islands’ city model (Ungers, 1977). We are living in redundant spaces, unfinished or unplanned, revealing a stopped growing process: we are talking about vacant spaces or, more often, completed spaces with function but without sense. We can define those spaces ‘urban lacunas’; they are protagonists in the loss of meaning of the whole work which is the city. Is abandonment a symptom of crisis or the result of a natural selection? We cannot continue categorizing shrinkage as a contemporary wound or a sign of decline; rather, we have to admit it is the expression of latent social behaviours and economic trends which bring us to reconsider quantity and quality of the space. The emptying scenario is a topic in the debate among local community and hyper-community (political and economic), two opposite fronts both for aims and kind of space use.To understand the reasons of shrinkage we have to observe how people meet, how they eat, what they buy, how long they live in public space or in private: substantially, it’s time to study the culture space capable of synthesizing the identity of a bigger de-territorialized community.Item Open Access Discovering scarcity: urban storytelling. Ten days of inventions, doubts, encounters, fallacies and working tools(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Maioli, SerenaThe first day I heard about scarcity, I was primarily curious about its meaning. In ten days, I discovered that no univocal explanation is possible. We can start debunking a myth: scarcity is not just a condition that exists in the poorest countries in the world. The urban experience of scarcity is ambiguous as a snake which sneaks around us changing its shape. Scarcity, suddenly, appears as the other face of richness, the dark edge of crystal skyscrapers: in the age of endless desire related to possession, whenever we discover inequalities, we see the fail of redistribution represented by a widespread condition of scarcity. I begin to look for a different angle, partially dark and partially shining, which allows me not to determine if I am seeing scarcity, but to understand the reason why the urban environment can be seen as scarce (just) by certain people. Now I am ready to discover when the snake changes its skin, and why.Item Open Access Embrace me when I’m walking: some personal notes in non-jargon(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Kustermans, ClennAfter being in school benches for a couple of days and listening to a dozen people saying that Bromley-by-Bow is the most deprived area in the UK, I went out for a walk in Bromley-by-Bow. Because I couldn’t confirm or deny what was said. Because I wanted to see it myself.Because I have always been attracted to deprived areas.To swap jeans in a butcher shop downtown Joburg.To walk and eat in Belsunce, Marseille.Parts of New Orleans.Real-life scarcities, daily scarcities. I had great expectations. And Bromley-by-Bow showed its sad side that rainy day. Sad houses, sad shops, sad people walking by, sad cars on wet streets. A sad breakfast with beans swimming down Stroudley Walk.Poor whites gambling their bits of money at Ladbrokes.Women with burkas and tender but discrete eyes walking out the beauty salon.A post office with an ATM, a vegetable shop, some women wearing plastic bags with whatever. No real British English but English as a mix of many tongues. Something beautiful. And it actually wasn’t too bad at all; despite the rain Bromley-by-Bow actually looked alright that rainy afternoon. No beggars, no hustlers, no streetwalkers, no kids scraping for food. People with families and houses and yes, possibly poor and with hard lives in bad working and housing circumstances, but it didn’t seem to be too bad…Item Open Access The european urban summer school (EUSS) and young planning professionals awards (YPPA)(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Mironowicz, Izabela; Martin, DerekIn 2010, the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) launched a new annual event: the European Urban Summer School (EUSS) for young planning professionals. AESOP wanted to bring together young professionals and experienced academics and practitioners across Europe to discuss spatial issues. AESOP’s aim was to facilitate a better trans-European understanding of planning issues, promote an exchange of ideas and foster a debate on the most important planning topics. These aims corresponded with AESOP objectives set out in the AESOP Charter. AESOP offers its teaching resources at EUSSs. Members of AESOP – European universities teaching planning – host the event. The EUSS is not a commercial venture. It is meant as a platform of debate and should be run on as low as possible fee for participants. Tutors do not get any fee for their work.Item Open Access Gentrification or local gain? Spatial development under austerity: the case of east london(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Ryser, JudithContext of the bromley-by-bow study area. Any long term scenario for future spatial development benefits from a long view into the past to discover the ‘archaeology of spatial memory’. Recovery from the Second World War with its devastating destruction is chosen to trace London’s regeneration strategies and efforts to rebalance London’s East and West. Patrick Abercrombie included rebalancing East and West in the 1944 London County Council (LCC) ‘Greater London Plan’, based on ‘social studies’ in the Charles Booth tradition,1 aimed to establish balanced local neighbourhoods2 and to decongest London into eight self-contained new towns beyond a newly established green belt to contain London’s growth. However, London’s population of 8.6 million in 1939 had shrunk by about half a million 3 and there was a great need to regenerate London’s destroyed fabric.Item Open Access Influence of globalization on cities: shopping malls in Czech Republic 1992-2012(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Háblová, AnnaThe information revolution and globalization has caused an overall awareness of the limited resources of the Earth. The basic social values are no longer only economic indicators such as efficiency, speed and mass production. There has been a transformation of social values and social paradigm and awareness of Scarcity as the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human wants and needs in a world of limited resources. From the perspective of the new paradigm are shopping malls unsustainable and unacceptable. What helped to recognize Scarcity was interconnection of information technology around the world, which was followed by economic globalization. Globalization is still unfinished, spontaneous and uncontrolled process of increasingly intensive integration of the countries of the world in a single economic system, which occurs since the seventies of the twentieth century (Sýkora, 2000). Globalization affects all disciplines, including architecture and urbanism. For work with large areas occurs change in solving urban problems. It is not possible to take into account only the site itself. When working with a specific area we already begin to look elsewhere than just in the immediate neighbourhood of solved area. Power that is moving from public to private sector is the key to naming influence of globalization on cities. Everything connected with multinational companies relate to globalization: the need for companies to be seen (tall buildings, skyscrapers), the expansion of branches (office complexes), the expansion of products (shopping centres), the need for rapid movement of human capacities (transport infrastructure), spatial separation of representatives of companies from the poorer part of town (residential zones - gated communities), relocation of production to other parts of the world (brownfields).Item Open Access Insurgence! Reclaiming the possibility of making the city(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Iossifova, DeljanaIn September 2012, almost 100 young planning professionals, post-graduate students, established academics and experienced practitioners came together in London to develop new approaches to issues around scarcity in architecture, planning and design. The Third European Urban Summer School (EUSS) – Times of Scarcity: reclaiming the possibility of making – was hosted in London by the University of Westminster, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, in collaboration with the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP), the International Federation for Housing and Planning (IFHP), the European Council of Spatial Planners (ECTP-CEU) and the International Society for City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP). The main partner in facilitating the EUSS was the London team behind the research project Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment (SCIBE). To coincide with the third EUSS, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment announced the International Award for Young Planning Professionals to encourage ideas with innovation potential on the topic of ‘Adapting Cities to Scarcity: new ideas for action’. The award-winning entries are included in this publication.Item Open Access Mind the gap: facts about scarcity? A confrontation of governmental and users’ perspectives of overcrowding in british housing(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Klein, Michael; Ascher, Barbara Elisabeth; Nunez Ferrera, IsisScarcity can be understood as an attempt to state a condition of lack or a limit of availability of something. What and when we consider something to be scarce relates to large extents to the motivation and the respective standpoint from where the claim scarcity is raised. The contextual forces, which range from the material conditions and its use to the cultural practices, norms and values expressed by people living in those specific environments, can be considered a decisive factor for the differences from what one considers as scarce to the other. Ultimately, it is a matter for what purpose we raise the question about scarcity: from a historical distance, from the perspective of the directly affected, as a designer, policy maker or from a critical theoretical perspective. It is, however, as well a question of the limits referred to and a matter of distribution, i.e. who gets what share. In order to discuss the challenges of scarcity in the discourses in planning and architecture, we look at the specific case of overcrowding in housing. Overcrowding can be considered a specific, ‘actual’ scarcity, as opposed to the theoretic abstraction of the concept of scarcity. Indeed, we are aware that any form of scarcity is constructed. Our aim is to discuss a dualism which arises from the attempt of separating abstract concepts from praxis within the realm of planning. Because of the relational character of scarcity, the dualism of the abstract category and the everyday experience and practices also affects our understanding of overcrowding. What we consider scarce, does not only relate to the respective context, but, in its relational nature, it shifts and alters with the changing context, which raises the question of how to define or determine scarcity.Item Open Access Re-using outdated infrastructure: the case of guadalmedina riverbed(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Sempere, Ramon; Marrades Segovia, ChemaIn this paper we present an urban process that will foster the benefits of an outdated infrastructure through public use, which works as a catalyst for economic revitalization. Guadalmedina River, in Málaga (Spain) is a dried river that splits the city in two parts. Architects drew up plans to recover this area as a public space. Politicians convened hearings. Editorialists wrote impassioned commentaries. But everything they planned was too costly and nothing happened for decades. The open model of Guadalmedina public use as presented in this proposal is an example of new forms of urban intervention in a context characterized by difficulties in making major interventions involving heavy investment efforts. It belongs to the orbit of the new trends in planning intervention based on the creation of new spaces of social opportunity, high impact, high effectiveness and low budgets. It involves the mobilization of underutilized resources of the city, in this case the Guadalmedina and all its area of influence, urban intelligence and opportunities to generate new resources for economic development and social enjoyment.Item Open Access Scarcity in practice: Assemble and sugarhouse studios(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014)If scarcity is the disjunction between wants/ambitions and the resources at hand, our work has been a process of prioritizing things, or the process of finding alternative means to fulfil ambitions. It is worth saying that what brought us together to work independently and in an undefined/continuously evolving way [as Assemble, a design and architecture collective], was our previous experience working in offices. The scarcity could be described as the lack of integrated design, or an understanding of how a task relates to the overall project ambition; how a CAD drawing relates to the act of casting concrete. As our practice grows, more ‘scarcities’ creep up, such as financial resources in relation to growing ambition, our experience in relation to a desire to maintain a democratic management, etc... Sometimes the realization of the ‘scarcity’ in a project, or in a situation, is what frames subsequent problem solving. Ignoring the ‘scarcity’, i.e. not taking a step back, has always had a detrimental effect on the work – for example not working out the budget/sustainability of a thing; relying too much on the power of on-site instinct; or vice versa. Similarly allowing the scarcity to lead the design has produced unexpected results. For Cineroleum for example, the desire to recreate the luxury of the picture palace combined with the need to find the cheapest, most durable materials. Similarly much consideration was invested into the details of the foyer, as well as the programming of the films – from popcorn holders to staff uniforms, car noise friendly films, everything was important. Not to mention the importance of making profit on the bar, as a way of covering our overheads.Item Open Access Scarcity thinking and planning theories(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Basso, MatteoPlanning contemporary cities requires new capacities of dealing with a great complexity of unexpected problems which have been challenging the established professional practices and creating an intense theoretical debate among academics. Obviously, this is not a new issue for planning theory and practice. In fact, since the mid-fifties of the twentieth century, a lot has been written with reference to the inefficacy and the impacts of the so-called ‘rational-comprehensive’ models of planning. In the Anglo-Saxon context, for instance, many planning theorists – for the most belonging to the field of political science and public policy analysis – have been arguing the limitations of such a decision-making approach for a long period of time. Among the huge amount of contributions, Lindblom (1959) and Altshuler (1965) have brilliantly pointed out the inadequacy of and the dissatisfaction with this dominant paradigm, focusing on the gap between goals and outcomes of planning policies 1. For Lindblom such an approach, far from being concretely practiced, represents indeed only an ideal and abstract formalisation. Planning processes – according to them – are dominated by persistent conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty concerning problems, goals and means which basically undermine the intellectual capacity of computing and dealing with them2 . Likewise, it has become extremely difficult for experts to take into account and assess the whole range of policy alternatives.Item Open Access Science fictionality(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Chattopadhyay, BodhisattvaWhat is science fictionality? It is not science fiction, not an envelope for literary or aesthetic artefact, however economical or extravagant. Science fictionality is the way in which we narrativise possibilities, whereby the experienced reality of our lives as individual and as species is temporally directed towards the future and conditionally bound to technoscientific change. Take for example the narrative of ‘planetary boundaries’, perhaps the quintessential science fictional narrative of our times in the dystopian vein. In 2009, Johan Rockström from Stockholm University and colleagues in a small article in Nature wrote about these ‘nine boundaries that define the safe operating space for humanity with respect to the Earth system and are associated with the planet’s biophysical subsystems or processes’. This was followed by the usual apocalyptic rhetoric: ‘If these thresholds are crossed, then important subsystems, such as the monsoon system, could shift into a new state, often with deleterious or potentially even disastrous consequences for humans.’ (Rockström et al., 2009) There were the terms that have in contemporary time become media watchwords: phosphorus, ozone depletion, climate change. There was also the usual cluster of allied associations: sustainability, conservation. Et cetera. In the humanities, GayatriSpivak, half a decade before, with her usual boldness, had proposed the acceptance of a new concept: ‘planetarity’: the recognition that we existed as a species, on a planet loaned to us. (Spivak 2003) 207 The same vocabulary, with the humanities inflection, watered the plant of her interdisciplinarity. We are running short of essentials, and time is running out. This narrative of planetary boundaries, itself an amalgam of ideas that have their origins in the industrial revolution, and even in their present sense since at least the first atomic weapon, transforms the future from an infinite field of mysteries to a dimly lit blind alley. A general alarmism maintains the industries of despair, and rightly so, and ensures continued funding for concerned activity: some of us need to fix the lamps on that blind alley.Item Open Access Shrinkage is sexy: A new strategy to make a shrinking urban area the most vital part of town(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Kustermans, ClennShrinkage is globally considered as a negative phenomenon, and shrinking cities are seen as the opposite of growing, successful cities. Psychologically, there’s strong coherence between this consideration and the development of our human body and mind. In our lives, shrinkage is the precursor of dying. But when city quarters dealing with a gradually declining population and an emptying housing stock are declared as Free States, these urban areas could become the most vital part of the body, err town. Within Free States, unused space could be exploited for the fulfilment of individual and collective living desires. Create whatever you want! Because of declaring Free States and striking out several regulations, (local) governments and collective house-owners can focus their gained time and money on small scaled actions. Strict and rigorous interventions are sometimes necessary, especially when too many houses lack occupancy. Overall quality can be increased by effective, inexpensive and fast actions. The tristesse of the former over-regulated shrinking area can slowly disappear, and possibilities for a happy life will attract young people who tend to start their career as independents. In order to shape a socially sustainable space, the idea of all generations living together is implemented in a new concept of state-offered services. To achieve such a thing, keywords are trust, community, solidarity and action. By showing the example of the post-socialist city of Chemnitz in Eastern Germany, I try to filter general principles that can be applied in other shrinking urban areas in Europe. Chemnitz, once an important industrial centre and the socialist model city Karl-Marx-Stadt, has been struggling with population decline and urban decay since the 1980s. Especially the ‘Plattenbausiedlungen’, or tower block areas, are in need of alternative answers. The potentials of the empty DDR blocks and the public space are huge.Item Open Access Software update for bromley-by-bow(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) BjörnBracke; Dudek, Dominika; Basso, Matteo; Santosm Rui; Grammatikopoulos, FotisBuild resilient communities! Complete dependence on external capital carries the threat of disequilibrium: revenue ‘flows out’ of the region Community based development is likely to give rise to a self-sustained system with revenue staying in the region; Governmental institution/regulations should be cautious of business models which allow to transfer the revenue outside of districts Local leaders should press for profit re-investment in the region Policies should support the establishment of small scale cooperative housing with appropriate financing and regulatory mechanisms For instance...gamification Collective ‘green’ action provides benefits for neighbourhoods: More natural and pleasant living environment Common goals (to become sustainable!) empower people Possibility to generate savings (generating own energy, etc...) The main challenge in raising public awareness of environmental issues is to restore the understanding of how the use of space and resources is related to environmental and social consequences. Therefore we have to connect technical and behavioural aspects to social and ecological value chains. By using technological developments in the built environment we could provoke a shift towards ecological perception. In order to encourage people to adopt technological devices (e.g., ‘ecometers’) in an urban context, technological devices could be implemented through the concept of gamification. Gamification is the use of game mechanics and game design techniques in non-game contexts. Technological devices in combination with smartphone apps and social networks to connect citizens to institutions and (public) services result in hyper-connected environments that harness the network effects and increase the involvement and understanding of citizens.