New Urban Topologies: Alexandria II PUBLIC SEMINAR ON PARTICIPATORY PLANNING The first public event of the second session of NUT Alexandria included a full day seminar where participants from the cities of Alexandria, East Jerusalem, Beirut, Jakarta, Mostar and Stockholm discussed local and global urban prospects and challenges with a focus on dialogue and communication. The conversation targeted community participation in official planning as well as and activist strategies of communication in the cities presented. Moderators were former diplomat and New Urban Topologies advisor Jan Nordlander and Deputy Director Cecilia Sternemo of the Swedish Institute in Alexandria. New Urban Topologies Pathways Cecilia Sternemo opened the seminar by underlining the importance of New Urban Topologies as a supporter of democratic participation in decision-making and maintaining the dialogue between officials, scholars and activists within the urban sphere in the city of Alexandria. NUT Project Director Thomas Lundh explained how this second session would go deeper than the previous one, focusing solely on a participatory planning and urban development as a mean towards a more transparent Egyptian democracy. He underlined that the tools that the project have made used of before mostly have been face-to-face meetings but that Färgfabriken now aims to complement these with digital communication and information strategies and that this session would be a starting point for this. Assistant Professor and architect Hebattallah Abouelfadl from Alexandria University held a lecture on the history of Alexandria with a focus on the area of Kafr Ashry, the chosen area for the collaboration of the planning offices of Stockholm and Alexandria as well as the case study for the present NUT session. The area is located in the vicinity of Minet El Bassal, an industrial area that was highlighted in the 2011 NUT Alexandria session and also described in in Färgfabriken’s book Alexandria City of Layers. Together with colleagues and students Hebattallah Abouelfadl had done preparatory research in the area under the headline Bringing Life Into Kafr Ashri by Putting People on Top of the List. In the following lecture, NUT’s ICT Expert Daniel Urey described how Information and Communication Technologies can be used to improve democracy. Based on his previous experiences working with activists and artists in Belarus as well as in the Middle East he underlined the potentials of digital tools as e-archives and e-books that can be used when oppressive powers are in charge. He also highlighted the benefits of digital tools as these can be spread as contain people’s experiences and documents in a cheap and effective way. The Need for Participation in Alexandria and Stockholm In her lecture, the Director of the Urban Planning Department of Alexandria Governorate Tahani Abou Emira emphasized the need for dialogue with the citizens of Alexandria. With the uprisings of 2011 she concluded that the city dwellers have shown that they want to be a part of the political process and she said her department is trying to respond to this matter of fact. She described four recent projects where there has been dialogue involved; two housing projects that included dialogues, the public recreation project Entertaining Forest where they seek the public’s opinions

and the upgrading of Mansheya Square which included a public competition. Finally Tahani Abou Emira said that the Urban Planning Department did not have dialogues with schools or other organizations before 2011 but that they now are trying to involve these stakeholders as much as they can. Here Färgfabriken can conclude that the department’s collaboration with Gudran happened through the first session of New Urban Topologies and has continued since. Urban Planning Strategist Niklas Svensson and Urban Planner Linda Palo, both of the City Planning Office in Stockholm, then explained why they see the citizen’s participation in the planning process as crucial as well as their methods to perform these necessary dialogues. They stated that participation is not only a principle of a democratic society but a necessity for them as planners to gain the trust of the people in order to be able to perform the projects that a growing Stockholm needs. Linda Palo then described a few recent cases where different participatory planning methods have been used, as the charrette and the open space workshop method. In all their projects the three main steps information, participation and feedback are always included. During the following discussion the audience lingered the issue of gaining trust. One person underlined the importance of making sure to realize projects after the dialogues in order to get people to trust the planners. Another one brought up the difficulty with getting inhabitants to come to the meetings in Alexandria. Niklas Svensson said the city of Stockholm also struggle with it but that a solution is to offer different kinds of meetings and to also invite people to say their opinion online. He and Linda Palo also got the question on what they do when people refuse their ideas. The answer was that they always try to be clear of that the dialogues make important advices, but are not legally binding. International Dialogue Experiences The Creative Director of Färgfabriken Joachim Granit began the third part of the seminar day with a description of the recent programs and exhibitions of Färgfabriken, as Building Blocks and Stockholm on the Move, and his aims with New Urban Topologies. He stated that one of the significant aspects with NUT is that it has and will continue to create a network of different people, cities and organizations. NUT is set to work as a door opener that will give its participants new contacts and methods that they can use outside the program. He urged the audience to consider what kind of society they want to build for the young generation. The director of the NGO Nahnoo in Beirut Mahammed Ayoub pointed out the huge lack of green areas and public spaces in Beirut. Having experience of living in a city where most of the shoreline is privatized and closed off, he warned the Alexandrian planners of doing the same. He then described the work of his NGO, which is focused mostly on online campaigns and so called sit-ins. One strategy has been to roll out fake grass across the city to get people’s attention on how the site would be like if it was devoted to public recreation. Senior Advisor at the Urban Planning Department in Mostar Senada Demirović Habibija then lectured on the modern history of Mostar, a city that went from multi-religious to extremely divided after the war ended in 1995. The current efforts of the city planning office, aims towards two key words: sustainability and identity, and she added that they were very inspired by the slogan ”Think Small” that came out of the NUT Mostar session in November 2012. She said that the NUT Mostar workshop was very inspirational for her department and added that she agreed with Färgfabriken’s aim to create an interactive NUT platform online.

The director of the Urban Poor Coalition in Jakarta Annye Frida Meilani Simbolon described work of her organization, which is focused on organizing communities so that they can make their voices heard and put pressure on politicians. The target groups of her NGO are street vendors, squatters, waste pickers and street children. The key solutions came from them she stated, as “Renovation Instead of Relocation”, and “the Community as a Guardian of the Environment”. The director of Al Hoash Gallery in East Jerusalem Rawan Sharaf gave the audience the political background of Palestine and described a current state of fragmentation, isolation, lack of infrastructure, lack of public funds, lack of documentation and lack of public spaces. Her art center does thematic and retrospective exhibitions, but they have also launched the Zaha Street Revival Project that aims to revive the street where they are located and make it an open, active cultural hub and develop the economy of the street in order to give jobs to the youth and strength to the community. The Program Manager of Gudran for Art and Development in Alexandria Abdallah Daif presented the projects of the NGO, as upgrading through culture in the fisherman’s village of El Max, the street exhibition space El Dokan and the youth and culture center El Cabina. He furthermore underlined the strong connection between society, politics, urban planning, architecture and art. Concluding Panel Discussion The moderators advised the theme of the concluding panel discussion to be the notion of trust which the panel accepted. Questions like: How do we build trust? Who is a representative for what? and Who are we building the city for? became the starting point of a discussion where all speakers as well as the audience were intensely engaged. The panel agreed on that the outcome of planning and architecture will be better if the people concerned will be asked and involved. But the question of unemployment and lack of education was also brought up as factors that are equally important to deal with as urban planning matters such as public space and housing. Rawan Sharaf broght up the problematic aspect of looking at people from above. She stressed that they, NGO managers and scholars, need to start to see themselves as a part of society. If not one will loose the trust of people. Senada Demirović Habibija added that even if the planners and the governments need a softer approach, there is also a need for ordinary people and families to listen to each other and try to see what is best for the city as a whole. The panel further talked about their personal engagement in those questions and that their willingness to go an extra mile in order to come to solutions originates from their own experiences and wishes to make the future better for their children. This strengthen Färgfabriken’s belief that the participants’ engagement in New Urban Topologies, whether online or in analogue meetings, often has a personal driving force which makes it important to ensure that the individual actors can continue to involve in the network as they are the ones that will make use of it and spread the words about it in their respective networks.