CENTRINNO
Photo: Living Archive is built by local explorations; here the one at the MACO in Geneva (Photo: Fab Lab Blonduos)
A new industrial revolution that puts citizens at the core of sustainable transformation
In the European Horizon2020-funded CENTRINNO project, nine cities have worked on and around (post-)industrial sites to establish and foster new ways of making, creating in the process so-called Fab City Hubs- ensuring cities are carbon-neutral by 2025.
The people who create these hubs explore, find, utilise and harness traces of the past, in the present, toward the future? What stories do they give space? Which layers and meanings do they attribute?
The Lectorate of the Reinwardt Academy had a leading role in this unique consortium and pioneered the usage of innovative collection and reflection methods to create the CENTRINNO Living Archive, and contributed to the CENTRINNO Handbook.
Period: 2020-2024
Project manager: Jonathan Even-Zohar
Making heritage for an inclusive and circular future?
CENTRINNO: A European Project about:
Transition and the city
We need to make a transition towards circular societies across the globe. In the broadest sense, this is about how we deal with what comprises the physical environment. The urban environment in particular plays a role here, because more and more people are moving to live in cities. There is a lot to be gained when consumption behaviours change and people begin producing in more circular and efficient ways. It is therefore logical that the European Union has set as one of the major goals that cities must become circular and smart.
Making hubs
The EU sees part of the solution in supporting initiatives by groups of people working on new nodes (hubs) in the city where things, materials and resources are consciously brought together, and people try to work together in a circular way. People may share knowledge and skills, focus on recycling, design new and egalitarian - forms of management and governance, restore the place of nature in and with the environment, etc. Research on such initiatives is being carried out under the EU-funded HORIZON programme.
Fab City movement
Can we create a model for Europe? The Fab City movement thinks so. Together with leading institutions and networks of architects, designers, explorers and urban makers, the Fab City initiative has been awarded a major research request within the HORIZON programme. With a budget of 8.4 million euros, nine countries are working on such a model, especially for places where initiatives to develop circular hubs can already be seen. These are often former industrial sites, where space is often plentiful and the land is not that expensive. These places are central to why the EU has commissioned the wider project, which examines the specific role of such former industrial sites in the transition to a circular society.
How to make our way to fit within planetary boundaries? This might be the greatest and most urgent challenge ever faced by humanity. This challenge is addressed by seeking to make the economy more circular and the society more inclusive. Underpinning all efforts is a quest to make the way we live together, with people and planet, regenerative instead of exhaustive. This quest touches all disciplines and approaches for change, and - precisely because change happens over time - the element of how we perceive and act in the now relates to how we imagine the future and how we are contextualized by the past, by stories.
Which stories we listen to, which we tell and retell, how and to who, plays a key role in the transition. So which stories matter? How do they relate to one another? What do these relations indicate?
What did the Reinwardt Academy do in CENTRINNO?
The Cultural Heritage research group wanted to know what heritage professionals can contribute to the major issues of our time, and the question of how we can achieve a circular and environmentally-orientated society (read: engendering socio-economic and climate-based justice) is one of those big questions – perhaps the most important, it is here where all the other questions come together.
The lectorate argued that heritage professionals (should) be experts in combining fieldwork, emotion networking and story curation with historical sensitivity, skill and curiosity. CENTRINNO offersedus the opportunity to test this statement by contributing to the toolkits and supporting the various teams in retrieving diverse stories (about the rise of factories, social movements, impact on daily life, gender relations, de-industrialisation, ecological perspectives, environmental impact related to globalization, etc). Which stories will be able to inspire and accelerate the transition in and around the nodes or 'hubs'? Who is inspired by it, and why? Who is not, and why not? How does this work, and what is the role of heritage dynamics in this?
Living Archive
The central responsibility of the Lectorate in the CENTRINNO project was to create a Living Archive, which is an open access platform containing content (stories) stemming from (post-) industrial sites, collected locally with participatory heritage methods. Its purpose is to help communities imagine what can be broadly described as a new ‘critical heritage of making’, and enable the creation of inclusive and circular hubs (Fab City Hubs).
Such a critical heritage approach aims to indicate the multi-layered, complex and sometimes conflicting nature of heritage items. These, in turn, aim to stimulate discussions on the role of the past in the present, and how to use these as inspirations for a more sustainable, socially inclusive, and circular future. The intentions of the Living Archive thus align with the principles of the Fab City Global Initiative.
The methodology and ethos of our Living Archive are replicable in other projects wishing to implement participatory heritage methods into their research and innovation practice.
Do you work on a project to establish a Fab City Hub? Or have you already realised one? We warmly suggest you explore our common CENTRINNO Handbook Regenerative Neighbourhoods in the Making and the CENTRINNO Fab City Hub Toolkit. You may find their contextual knowledge on the usage of heritage in your work.
Should you want to work on heritage and also co-collect stories, we are more than happy to receive your inputs through our form!
The content found within the Living Archive consists of many different types of data, which has been co-collected in a participatory manner. Stories include text, visual imagery, artistic work, audio recordings, oral histories, and beyond. These stories have been collected via the participatory heritage methodologies utilised and disseminated by the AHK and another partner project, Imagine IC, also in Amsterdam. Three (sometimes intersecting) main methods for collecting this content are used: Emotion Networking, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews, each of which have ‘how-to’ guides embedded within the Fab City Hub Toolkit in the section Curate the Past Toward the Future.
Emotion Networking, a methodology developed by the Reinwardt Academy, part of the Amsterdam University for the Arts, and Imagine IC, brings together different stakeholders to collectively discuss and map their emotional responses to an item of discussion which could be understood as heritage - for example a bridge, a knitting practice, a polluted lake, a flag, a flower, etc. - before adjusting their position based on the testimony of others. Several rounds take place, including the imagined perspective of absent stakeholders and the introduction of additional information, so as to give as wide a perspective on the (prospective) heritage item as possible.
Ethnographic fieldwork consists of exploring the site via communicating with people and recording sights, sounds, smells, and so on, and then documenting what happens through these ethnographic excursions.
Oral Histories and/or Interviews - undertaken with makers, local inhabitants, policy makers, creatives, business owners, former industrial workers, and so on - allow people with particular stories about the area the space to explain their understanding of the site, its history, the interrelation between past, present and future, or their personal relationship to it.
Once it has been collected - which often first takes place on the local level in the form of an exhibition - it is assigned tags according to notable characteristics, formulated into a narrative, and uploaded to the digital infrastructure of the Living Archive. This then shows both the geographical placement of the story and also how it connects to other collected stories which can be associated via one of these assigned tags. We hope you enjoy exploring these heritage items and their network of relations!
Want to know more about CENTRINNO?
Please contact jonathan.even-zohar@ahk.nl
Who
The Living Archive is the result of work within the H2020 funded CENTRINNO project. Its development was part of a complex co-creative process alongside other key resources, such as the CENTRINNO Cartography and the Fab City Hub Toolkit. It has been conceptualised and developed by the Reinwardt Academy, part of the Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK) and other partners within the CENTRINNO project, in conjunction with designer and developer Alessandro Amato at A++ Studio, using the sanity.io web database and content management system.
When
The Living Archive was developed between 2020-2022 and launched in 2023. It will remain alive and kicking thanks to... your contribution? We welcome you to share your stories.
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