ABSTRACT
Ecosistema Urbano developed a participation and network design process that it has dubbed Dream Your City, for the Dreamhamar project in the Norwegian town of Hamar, 130km from Oslo. Ecosistema Urbano made the participative brainstorming part of coursework from institutions ranging from the Bergen School of Architecture and the Norwegian School for Gardeners, to the Polytechnic University of Milan and the Istituto Europeo di Design. Ecosistema Urbano bases its urban social-design processes on semi-scientific theory, assembling an engaged stakeholder constituency as the first step of every project. It sees many future possibilities in participatory processes that have already been widely disseminated all over the world, especially in the US and northern Europe where citizens have a strong sense of community and cooperation. It has been keen to engage in Spain, a country hard-hit by economic crisis, and its research there has shown that in this field, a lack of organisation meets high-quality creativity, typical of the Latin culture.
