OPEN CALL CITY LABS
Do you work for a local government or do you want to work together with one? Pay close attention! For the fourth and also last time the Stimuleringsfonds is calling on local governments and other urban developers to jointly submit proposals for the development and further professionalization of existing city lab initiatives, and for setting up new forms of partnerships that locally experiment with new participation processes. As creative incubator and open learning space, these initiatives offer room for free experimentation with the development of innovative, broadly supported solutions for current spatial and socio-economic challenges. Design plays an important role in this. Submit a proposal no later than Wednesday January 17th, 2018.
The Netherlands has a long and rich tradition in experimentation in the field of spatial organization. A lot of attention has been paid therein to the interaction between societal issues and the spatial organization of our country. In recent years, an increasing amount of stakeholders has been engaged in the development of cities. In the city labs, collectives of involved residents, entrepreneurs, designers and other spatial professionals work together with institutional parties, such as cultural and societal organizations, knowledge institutes and local governments, on new ways of city making in which everyone can contribute from their own ambition and specific knowledge to the quality of our daily habitat.
ProeftuinNL
In the past three years, the Stimuleringsfonds (Stimulation Fund) has supported a network of about forty city labs, in which work was done on current issues with great enthusiasm. The knowledge and experience that was gained with new partnership forms and participation processes has been exchanged within the city lab network and discussed with city lab representatives and formal institutions under the banner ProeftuinNL, so as to advance mutual collaboration. This made clear that governments and other local stakeholders are increasingly seeing the benefits of an initiative-rich society and have, in consideration of the shared interest, developed a co-operative attitude toward the labs. The labs know how to connect agendas of top-down parties and bottom-up initiatives with each other and how to translate good ideas into concrete projects that can offer a relevant contribution to the future development of the city. But in order to better guarantee their continuity in the future, there certainly is a need for a political mandate as well.
Public entrepreneurship
The governments in many cities look with great interest at the achievements of the city labs. In some cities the municipalities participate in the city labs, but in Maastricht the local government even goes a step further. There, the municipality has displayed public entrepreneurship by initiating a city lab themselves and by constructively deploying public initiatives for the innovation of local spatial policy. In turn, the challenges that are brought to light in the lab provide new insights into the system and living world, which, in the context of the new habitat law, can also be used for governmental innovation. But since this isn’t a given everywhere yet, we gladly stimulate that development in multiple locations in the country.