Participants – Facilitators and Experts
Zuzana is part of SPOLKA – a collective of architects, artists and sociologists based in Bratislava, Prague, Berlin and Košice. Their aim is to cultivate the public realm through educational activities, artistic and architectural interventions, and institutional and public dialogue. SPOLKA concentrates on concrete issues related to the city, public spaces, participation, inequality and communication.
SPOLKA has, in its short life, designed and implemented projects like PĽAC (participatory playground and community space design/build project), ŠAK Belehradská (research and development project exploring the possibility of school as a space for community-making), ŠAK Užhorodská (experimental participatory process of turning a primary school into a space for community) and B304 (experimental bistro, exploring food as a place-making tool).
About my project
In Košice, like in so many other post-socialist cities, we lack a culture of participation. We believe that participation is a crucial component of any functioning democratic society and therefore we find it important to nurture it. As architects, planners and urban researchers, we want to focus on supporting and initiating participatory practices at various scales of city-making and in this way we want to cultivate the culture of participation.
The project will pioneer these ideas in the city by testing a participatory process model centred around the development of the new land-use plan. We will work closely with the city authorities, especially with the department of city planning, to develop a communication strategy and a city-wide dialogue involving local experts and politicians as well as the wider public in development of the plan.