NEWSPAPER of the City Scanning Session

of the City Scanning Session

Curator's Introduction

Idea of the newspaper: Olha Perekhrest and Anna Kuzyshyn Editor-in-chief: Olha Perekhrest Translation: Roksolana Mashkova Printing: LCC Bukovyna Publishing House Design and illustrations: Dasha Zaichanka www.dashaza.com

MANUfaktura + FUTURum: manufacturing of the future If we found a big idea, then in just one festival we could manage to do something for the city that you usually need three years to do.

This was how the City Scanning Session was conceived three years ago, at the CANactions school.

The festival takes place every two years, after long and thorough research. The topic of this year’s festival is MANUFUTURING. It’s a fictional word, but with non-fictional meaning.

Since last year, MetaLab has settled in a still functioning Promprylad factory with 113 years of history, in a challenging postindustrial neighbourhood. Our research of the factory led us to care about the future of production here.

The whole space of PromPrylad factory is still alive and quite connected to the city. So while other projects are really starting from scratch, here there is an opportunity to create a continuity between the living industrial heritage and innovations.

Cities today face complex social, environmental and economic challenges: in new forms of technology and business models, in climate change, and in changing demographics and social issues. In this context, we need an evidence-based debate about what the manufacturing base can offer the city, and what it might help us to achieve in the future. In Ivano-Frankivsk, we have found ourselves at a crucial point where we can still answer these questions without having to go back and fix something.

That is why for us, this year’s City Scanning Session is a platform for a discussion about MANUFUTURING, the future forms of manufacturing in cities.

Anna Pashynska

MANUs+ FUTURum: creating the future with our own hands Promprylad.Renovation has plans to develop the city, the region and the country. But it is still unclear how it will affect the neighborhood around it. Gentrification is inevitable with this project, but one of the ways to mitigate it is to involve different urban communities in co-creation. It became our primary goal with this large-scale initiative.

However, the more we study the context and immerse ourselves in working with various population groups, the more we recall a 1968 French Atelier Populaire poster: "I participate, you participate, we participate, they profit."

We are thinking more and more about what parti cipation is: a tool for creating a democratic society or an instrument for mitigating conflict?

As a part of the festival, we want to rethink participation in the city space through the urbanist residence WE ARE NEVER ALONE. By observing the city, studying it, the residents will discover social connections that already exist here. Or maybe they will establish unpredictable new ones. Or even conclude that we just need to leave the residents alone.

Using the opportunity, we want to create an alternative space for the community of the neighborhood and the city — the open shopfloor. But will this space and this community be able to grow into something bigger?

We start the experiment with this publication, we develop it with the workshops, the public program and art and architecture projects in the neighborhood during the festival month, and we will consolidate it at the symposium.

MANUal+ FUTURe: manual for the future We have defined the territory of the Promprylad neighborhood on the grounds of its location, its main roads, its social infrastructure. That’s how we drew a square on the map, 30 percent of which is covered with industrial facilities. In this neighborhood, single-family houses of the mid-19th century German Colony stand next to Polish Modernism villas of the 1930s and 1940s, Soviet worker's settlements of the 1960s, the first "model" Khrushchev-era buildings and questionable contemporary high-rises. The neighborhood has schools, preschools, libraries, universities, colleges and medical facilities.

That is how we got a setting for our festival, as well as a test model of the neighborhood.

With its help, we want to test the program of decentralization at the city level. Because Ivano-Frankivsk, unlike Lviv or Kyiv, has no division into administrative districts.

One of our first steps in studying the factors that affect the autonomy and the nature of forming the neighborhood identity was the FutureLab project in partnership with Technical University Kaiserslautern (Germany). One of its important aspects is to expand the existing functions of the revitalized Promprylad in order to better integrate it into the neighborhood. This work resulted in a strategy of the neighborhood’s development for the next 20 years, a kind of manual to the future, which we will present on the festival’s final days.

This publication is your guide to the world of MANUFUTURING. Let’s meet there to explore the city together, to experiment, to plan — and discuss it all in the company of daring city lovers.

Anna Kuzyshyn

Anna Dobrova

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#115b52 The newspaper is released in the framework of the festival City ScanPantone 561 C C089 M042 Y064 K029 ning Session 2019 with the support of USAID and the Ukrainian Cultural R107 G186 B118 #6bba76 The content of the articles is sole responsibility of authors Foundation.

Pantone 7489 C C062 M000 Y067 K000 and does not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or US government.

The position of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation may not coincide with the opinion of the authors.

Urban Festival "City Scanning Session" is the project of the "Teple Misto" platform.

Support the project and other initiatives of the "Teple Misto" on the official website of the organization: www.warm.if.ua

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Content

Cities for Living / Cities for Manufacturing How the New Wave of Industrialization Changes City Life

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Common Cause Who Works at Promprylad and Nearby

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Nurturing Diversity How Social Relationships Help the Economy

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The Second Chance How and Why Cities Revitalize Abandoned Structures

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Decentralizing the City How to Work with Districts

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Scanning the Neighborhood What Can Be Found on the Map around Promprylad

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Right to the City What Is Participation?

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From Confrontation to Doubt The Strengths and the Weaknesses of Participatory Art

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Outposts of Digitization What Fab Labs Are and Why We Need Them

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Open the Workshop!

A Place Where Makers, Students and Festival Visitors are Welcome

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Alexander Shevchenko, co-founder of the Comixans urban group, curator of the zero year of the Kharkiv School of Architecture curator

Cities for Living / Cities for Manufacturing

The manufacturing potential of cities affects how the city lives. Entrepreneurs manage businesses, the city government manages the urban development. Meanwhile, city residents swim between these two city-forming "whales," gathering into schools of the civil society. In addition, they are also the consumers of manufacturing products. This "business — government — consumers" triangle is the center around which various combinations of collaboration and interaction in the urban environment emerge.

Cities develop, businesses work — they regularly experience economic downturns, overcome them and then reach the peak of progress again. The nature of the market and healthy competition sets the operating conditions and the pace for companies. Day by day, manufacturing processes become more complex, engage new technology, create new jobs. But at the same time, companies push cities further and further in terms of energy consumption leadership and environmental pollution.

The increasing energy consumption and rapidly growing pollution in the city are the implications of the increased interest in the city, in urban areas and square meters. Everyone wants to be in the city. In part due to this interest, we see gentrification — the process of displacing less profitable and financially successful groups and forms of the city, and filling the best urban typologies with expensive housing. Suddenly traditional workshops in spacious yards can no longer rent their rooms, so they leave the city looking for more affordable options, and settle on the outskirts or even in rural areas.

Many cities in Western and Central Europe have already felt the need to respond to this tendency: to dilute this "solution" of expensive housing and to bring sustainable and economical manufactur-

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ing back into various urban neighborhoods.

Cities of the New Industrialization More and more people are going to live in cities. So these settlements are going to become ever more loaded with human progress. Whole departments of analysts are working to optimize urban processes and transform them. The challenges of the future cities include bringing back manufacturing, new chains of product consumption, environmental and economical optimization of manufacturing, and new jobs at new or repurposed manufacturing facilities.

Cities will not stop growing and developing. And industry is actually the field that will allow them to balance various social groups of residents and play out in favor of the local economy.

Today, the world is going through the flourishing stage of industrialization 4.0. It is an evolutionary extension of its previous versions, when the humanity moved forward step by step, first to craft production, then to factories. Then manufacturing was transported overseas, in pursuit of optimal production costs. Industrialization 4.0 has also been dubbed "re-industrialization," because it brings manufacturing back to cities, but in a new form. Its slogan is to balance the use of urban space, to reduce industrial pollution, to create new jobs. The question remains, What should manufacturing look like in order to be less polluting for the space around it?

In this form, industrialization and its success depend on incentives provided by the relevant urban policies, because the sphere of urban manufacturing, as well as any other market sphere, is controlled by business laws. And if a model is imperfect or incapable, sooner or later it will be invited to leave. To leave the city or the country.

New Manufacturing in Urban Areas As the global economy progresses, new formats and forms of manufacturing gradually arise. This results in such phenomena as "in-

dustrial parks," "craft production," "fab labs," which are all new for us. These are examples of new urban manufacturing.

The promising and desirable industries for the city are: — the ones that transform physical materials, such as furniture workshops, sculpture bureaus, studios, set design and landscaping companies; — the ones that involve physical labor, instruments, machines, such as workshops repairing household appliances, jewelry workshops, watch and clock repair workshops; — the ones that create physical products as a result of recycling waste into new items; — the ones that focus on manufacturing as the core of their business and produce limited editions of products, such as bespoke suits.

It should be taken into account that a balanced, sustainable form of new manufacturing does not appear on its own, out of the blue.

Everything new either originates in history or is a result of a long search and targeted support.

When we talk about filling vacant spots with new workshops, it is important to remember that these projects must be based on ideas that are competitive and tested on the city’s or the country’s market.

For example, as you open a new technological cheese manufacturing facility in Halychyna, you need to take into account the general state of cheese production and the dairy industry at the regional or national level. But in addition, it’s worth analyzing similar cases at the global level — Switzerland, New Zealand — and to learn some useful particularities from them.

Still, before you start the full-scale manufacturing, it is sometimes useful to test a scaled-down model of this mode of production.

A special characteristic of manufacturing today is deep market analysis which uses various approaches, such as value engineering and target costing. The former approach is about analyzing manufacturing by components — marketing, logistics, product development, etc.

— in terms of compliance with the standards of

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best market players in each industry. The target costing principle means making high-quality products within clearly specified cost limits.

These principles set the direction for technology search and for pricing. Thus, if a manufacturer works on its market research, it will be able to find its place and not shut down in half a year due to lack of demand or excessively high prices.

There are manufacturers and companies who think they can "mess around" for a while, spending their own resources or invested funding, until the actual state of affairs becomes clear. And this time comes, sooner or later.

Any manufacturer that does not live according to planned economy laws finds itself in a competitive environment. In the 21st century, it is very likely that a small business from Ukraine will at some point compete for markets with other countries, such as China.

Today, the market no longer lives according to the principle of the lowest cost, even though there are still industries which self-destruct because of the destructive behavior of their players — the quality of products does not improve but, on the contrary, deteriorates (such as the household appliances market, agriculture, agribusiness). Instead, there is greater focus on how to come up with a better mechanism for product manufacturing or functioning — that is, on engineering. In this situation, special role is played by the newest technology and IT solutions.

The idea of restoring the manufacturing facilities of Soviet factories has been growing more popular lately. But it should be taken into account that these factories were built for planned, non-competitive economy, and they were inadequate from the start without the state’s involvement.

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In the 1990s, Ukrainian manufacturing was at the level of the 1970s in the West in terms of development and technology. It was possible to set up the transition process in Ukraine in the 1990s by handing the manufacturing facilities over for "conditional dollars" to private investors who would be capable of transforming them into a manufacturing system compatible with the Western countries. Privatization of industrial facilities did indeed take place, but only a few of the investors could bring these facilities up to the next level. For the rest, the moment was wasted, and now the gap in industrial technology has reached 40 to 50 years.

To return to the arena of effective production, it is no longer sufficient to introduce efficient practices, such as lean management or the agile principle (the principle of flexible response in strategizing and project management). An effective and innovative idea is required. Thanks to this step, a business or a manufacturer can leap, even if for a short while, to the leadership position in a certain niche and take over a share of the market.

Who Is Capable of Carrying Out the Transformation?

European and Ukrainian cities have many industrial areas that have fallen out of the agenda. On the other hand, these areas take up a lot of land which can cover as much as a quarter, a third or even a half of the urban territory. The intuitive impulse is to offer to re-equip or modernize these industrial facilities and re-orient their activities to satisfy the needs of the economic spheres which have just emerged or which can have a comeback.

From the pragmatic perspective, the success of such an initiative will depend on several factors. To generalize, we can group these factors into three categories: 1. Support from the city administration, not at the level of the specific case, but at the level of city policy and creating proper conditions.

2. Practicality and feasibility of locating businesses in the areas that are specifically

allocated for new production.

3. Interaction with the market, an original idea, impeccable management.

Let’s examine these one by one. First of all, the local administration, within the scope of its authority, can determine the priority industries for the city. For these industries, it can allocate the territories of old factories, abandoned locations close to the city center, vacant offices or spaces in mixed-use facilities.

If the city administration has a consistent strategy, it can compete more actively for vacant privately-owned lots.

New manufacturers can collaborate with the local market and thus considerably reduce their utility fees, logistics and storage costs, turning into competitive regional and national players.

The industries that are desirable for cities include creative industries. In May 2019, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture defined the list of professions that are considered to be creative industries, so now we can clearly distinguish the producers that work for them or provide them with services. In the city, they can take the forms of design workshops, craft points, printing shops, studios and so on. But this is only one part of the new manufacturing.

The effectiveness of adopting these types of production at different facilities mostly depends on the availability of relevant infrastructure and its capacity, the rent rates and the speed of adaptation of a territory’s functional purpose for the needs of production.

It is not enough just to find a workshop. It must have enough water and power, the rent must allow you to set a competitive price for the product, and first of all you need to have the right to locate your manufacturing in a facility which used to host a local newspaper editorial office or a warehouse.

Third, even if the first two requirements are met, manufacturing will not be sustainable and successful without a proper model and management.

Today, the world, and Eastern European countries in particular, are facing the issue of

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creating new manufacturing platforms. The functioning capacity of the global industry today is barely over 50 percent. In general, this means that one in two, and in some cases even one in three factories or plants do not work.

Therefore, returning to our original point, for a product to be competitive, it needs innovative technology and a non-trivial idea.

These production enterprises and innovative startups must emerge systematically to create a new stratum of manufacturers who have reached the next industrial level. This effect can be achieved, for example, by systemic investment in startups or innovation centers that develop new products or services. In China, France, Poland this kind of investment reaches tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.

An example of an innovative startup system in Ukraine is the Unit.City in Kyiv, which concentrates a number of corporate incubators and accelerators, an IT academy, a fab lab and many other residents. It was decided not to continue the historic manufacturing in a motorcycle plant, but rather to focus on cultivating an innovative ecosystem.

It is hard for local producers to survive without systematic support from the city, especially at the beginning of their work. In addition, urban manufacturers do not always unite in associations whose voice can be heard. That is why local manufacturers are often simply not listened to. Similarly to startup ecosystems, local manufacturers need to receive systemic investment, and the labor market must constantly be warmed up with new skills and relevant education.

The reason is that contemporary working models of production are more intellectual than purely manufacturing. Instead of serial production of affordable motorbikes, a motorcycle plant can host several micro-manufacturers that serve as a design workshop for the city’s architectural offices. This considerably reduces the amount of harmful emissions within the city boundaries, and the target audience changes. It’s no longer the mass market; but any

student, architect or even a whole company can use the services of this workshop.

Of course, there is an illusory vision of craftsmen who look like our grandparents returning to cities and crafting things with a soul while listening to the radio. A craft bakery is working nearby, and sets for the local theater are being made across the street.But the reality is that due to automatization and introduction of new technologies, these producers often turn out to be uncompetitive. That is why in this case, being different from others does not mean winning or taking a step forward. It is now hard to become unique by copying the existing open models.

In the end, the success of manufacturing in the city depends on teamwork cooperation of businesses, the city hall, investors, researchers, innovators, various local communities. That is, in case of successful, evenly distributed and diverse development, the city will not just have the expensive housing in the center, but also balanced neighborhoods with varied types of activities. This will allow not to counterpose but to combine living in the city and manufacturing in the city.

Iryna Shutka, journalist

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Common Cause

Who Works at Promprylad and Nearby

1980 2018

1956 1939 1900

1990

Manufacturing has been active in the Promprylad neighborhood for over 100 years now. In the early 1900s, the area had several manufacturing facilities. The Kraj company produced streetlights, railway brake shoes, mill drives and so on. Fama specialized in metal casting and processing, and you can still find manhole covers produced by this factory under your feet as you take a walk in Frankivsk. The third well-known facility was Waclaw Major’s mechanical scales factory, which manufactured and repaired scales.

After 1939, the manufacturing facilities were nationalized. During the World War II, the industrial structures were destroyed, but this was soon followed by a rise: in 1956, the scales factory and the machine building factory were combined to form the Stanislav Machine Building Plant. Later it would change its name several times and reorient its production to manufacturing appliances, such as gas meters, manometers, electronic computing devices for the oil and gas industry; and then to consumer goods.

Promprylad’s manufacturing peaked in the 1980s: it had up to 5,000 workers, and its products were exported to 26 countries. In the 1990s, the manufacturing declined, because it wasn’t easy to adjust to the demands of the free market. A small fraction of the production has been preserved at Promprylad. Today, it produces gas and petrol product meters, manometers.

New types of production were spurred by the Promprylad.Renovation project, launched in 2018.

The old factory walls will soon host a lab for industrial experiments, while a number of creative production facilities making original accessories, video content, printed products, etc., are already up and running.

Just like a hundred years ago, new companies also operate right next to Promprylad. So let’s meet the local manufacturers.

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Yuriy Dublenych, executive at the DubKo company: Who are DubKo. The DubKo company is already over 15 years old. It all started with a small office and two co-owners: Andriy Dublenych and Vasyl Kobernitsky. Their last names formed the name of the company.

This is a prototype of a family business.

A lot of workers stay with the company for many years, and they "grow up" from loaders to warehouse managers, from salespeople to foremen or executives. For example, one of the first company salespeople is now its chief of commerce.

Today, the office and the manufacturing facility employ up to 50 people. The company’s big customers include Ars Bud, Passage Gartenberg, the Fomich Hotel, many other hotels in Bukovel, various companies. We have worked with Chicken Hut for a long time. We have a very good relationship and we’re glad

that our business partner is quickly developing — and we grow together.

Components of success.

I dare say that at the moment the DubKo company is a leading furniture manufacturer in Ivano-Frankivsk. We are growing thanks to the right strategy — we invest our working capital in manufacturing, its improvement and expansion. We have our own sawing centers with modern equipment (Ukraine has about 20 such centers). While the majority of cutting happens on a panel saw, and the cutters work directly with the furniture plate by hand, a sawing center allows us to automate the process: the worker only feeds the materials, setting the relevant program beforehand. This ensures high-precision cutting, allows us to produce big volumes quickly. Last year, we also purchased a new German machine that allows us to automate high-quality hole making in our products. We have a design office, where projects are designed according to customer

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specifications, where all the furniture patterns are cut out, the assembly plan is provided — and the customer receives their assembly kit.

Quality is important for us, because it provides guarantees which every customer needs.

Kindred spirits.

I have special memories about the Promprylad factory. My grandma used to work in the umbrella workshop. I remember her coming out to the factory entrance to fetch me and take me to her workplace. This place is historically important for Ivano-Frankivsk; it’s a center of industrial development, whose products used to be known around the whole post-Soviet region. I was sad to see the factory turn into ruins in the past few decades. So I’m glad that Promprylad has got a new life now.

Yuriy Chaban, co-founder and CEO of the Beton Prime company: Memories about the neighborhood.

I come from this neighborhood: I was born and spent my childhood in a house next door to Promprylad, building number 29. I studied at the 21st school nearby. I know every block here through and through, I know the people.

I remember the times when there was a brick factory across the street from Promprylad, and some of the houses that are now near the facility did not exist. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, there was no Melnyk Street: there was a thicket and a dirt track (which was not completely safe to walk on). Melnyk Street was laid down especially for a trolleybus route, to decongest today’s Konovalets Street. When I was a kid, the lake near Promprylad was very popular. I broke my arm there two times, and my leg once. I saw children fall into a hole in the ice. We used to play hockey there, go skiing. In winter, the lake could be covered with over a hundred children, like ants. As for Promprylad, I remember people going to work at the factory every morning. But it was a restricted area, so we didn’t know what was happening there. We only knew that umbrellas were made here (they were sold all over the city

back then), and meters.

Neighbors.

The Beton Prime company is located on Rebet Street, not far from Promprylad. We are two years old. We specialize in making street furniture and landscaping work. We cooperate with local municipal services, the Ivano-Frankivsk City Council: we manufacture elements of street infrastructure which they order. One of our latest big projects was the production and assembly of street furniture for the reconstructed Mickiewicz Square and Lesia Ukrainka Street. We also work for the Promprylad neighborhood: we make components for local playgrounds, sports grounds.

For example, in 2017, we designed and realized the small park on 30 Sakharova Street, which is directly opposite Promprylad. And now the yard of that building is being reconstructed, and we’re also going to make furniture for the yard.

Typical things and innovation.

We offer products made of concrete, metal and wood. One of our most popular concrete products are ping pong tables. Such a table, compared to a metal or wooden one, is not afraid of weather effects throughout the year, does not require maintenance. These products are popular for fun, for games. There are over 20 of them in Frankivsk. Over 15 in Khmelnytsky, about 5 in Lviv, 2-3 in Ternopil, about 5 in Kyiv. We’re currently making some for Cherkasy and Poltava. A concrete ping pong table is our innovation which we designed. We also make metal components for street furniture, such as benches, chairs, tables, parking poles, climbing gyms and figurines for playgrounds. For esthetic appearance, we decorate them with wood. In this, we collaborate with contractors, of whom there are plenty in the region.

Positive change.

Before, in the Soviet period, in the 1990s, street furniture was not custom made for a city’s needs. The function of filling the yards, streets, parks was then a responsibility of the

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municipal companies that serviced these areas.

These municipal companies usually manufactured various elements of outdoor infrastructure (garbage bins, flower beds, street lights, poles) on their own. If they needed something more serious, they looked for manufacturers, but there were very few of them. In recent years, the situation has changed: the street furniture market is developing. Still, competition is not very intense in Frankivsk: for some manufacturers, it’s a side line of production, for others, such as developers, it’s a component of their bigger projects. However, the contemporary approach does suggest involving specialized companies with experience.

Developers provide their project solutions, and then we work with those. Although there have been some positive shifts, in general it’s still hard to break the approach of developers, city managers, and to deliver to them the message that landscaping must not be funded as an afterthought. We persuade our customers that elements of landscaping are important, they are an important component of the projects, they must be high-quality, they are not something that can be used to save money, because it would be bad for the residents, look cheap and ruin the environment.

Natalka Nayda, leader of the Shuflia and Bukvica projects, founder of the Little Ones project: About the projects.

Bukvica sews T-shirts, sweatshirts and provides silk stencil printing services. Shuflia is a family business manufacturing leather accessories. We have worked for 10 years now, and we’ve always tried to be open.

Today, the Shuflia workshop is located on the pilot floor of the Promprylad.Renovation project. People often visit us: sometimes on purpose, and sometimes a visitor of Promprylad.Renovation runs into us by chance.

People love being able to see how things are made, they can place a custom order. I would like our workshop to turn into an R&D shop in

the future, where designers, product designers could design, and the manufacturing would be elsewhere. In addition to Shuflia, we have another project in Promprylad, the Little Ones kids space. It’s important for me to be in this environment; it’s an opportunity to talk to the employees, to stay up to date.

Noah’s Ark and its people.

Being at Promprylad for us is an opportunity and access to knowledge, resources, collaborations at the intersection of different areas of work, which is what the modern world requires. It’s great that there’s a MetaLab Urban Platform here, whom we can consult about design, that there are IT specialists, such as Andriy Chernikov, whom we can talk to about technical things, there are accountants who can advise us about the books, and there’s a bar where you can get some negroni on Friday night. People here are great, and there are no random passers by: not everyone reaches this place, and that’s cool. Sometimes it feels like you live in a perfect world, a bubble (I call Promprylad.Renovation a Noah’s Ark), but on the other hand, environments of this kind help you move forward, create something new.

* Historical information taken from the book A Hundred Years of History — A Hundred Years of Labor by B. Havryliv and M. Holovaty (Ivano-Frankivsk: Tipovit, 2005), and from a study of Promprylad’s history by NGO Different Education.

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Oleksiy Moskalenko, researcher in anthropology, Analytics Center at the Ukrainian Catholic University

Nurturing Diversity

How Social Relationships Help the Economy

Every day we pass through a flow of information about various technological advancements and innovative companies. All this progressive chaos can actually be easily structured once placed in the perspective of circular economy that aims to utilise human and other natural resources in the most efficient way. It is not surprising that few people are genuinely interested in economics; however, this subject brings many exciting changes that are interesting to follow.

Nowadays most countries measure the success of their economies with the instrument formulated by Simon Kuznets, an economist who was raised in Rivne and then studied at the Kharkiv Economic University. Professor Kuznets proposed the concept of GDP to the US Congress in the early 1930s as a tool for preventing another Great Depression. Therefore, now humanity, with all its hyperloops and

bitcoins, measures its own effectiveness with an antique instrument formulated before a ball pen was invented and 40 years before the first email was sent. Moreover, professor and Nobel laureate Kuznets himself warned about the limitations of this index and highlighted that it can only be used to measure income.

For example, if Mykola from Ivano-Frankivsk region buys a Ukrainian-made rifle in a local gun store and wounds his neighbor Sergiy, who then has to be treated for a long time at a local hospital, this whole story will contribute to the GDP growth of Ivano-Frankivsk region and the whole Ukraine.

On a more global level, there are similar contradictions. If a company pollutes a river and then local authorities spend budget money to clean it up, both transactions will be added to the index. Although the environmental impact of these two operations will be neutral at best.

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Natural and man-made disasters and the related costs are also positive news for the GDP. The list of counterintuitive examples can be continued.

Many scholars are calling to measure the livelihoods of countries with other indexes that contribute to the GDP. For instance, the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator), besides the economic performance of produced and consumed goods, also takes into account social and environmental data. The cost of road accidents and the time spent in traffic is deducted. At the same time, the value of housework, parental care and volunteering is added. There are many proposals on how to better measure our lives.

Academics, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum actively discuss more inclusive indicators, and their urgency and popularity will only increase.

The model that will supposedly replace the modern linear economy of irresponsible production and consumption is called "circular" — with its philosophy of recyclable, effective and rational use of resources. This idea is not new. On the contrary, it copies the mechanisms of nature (biomimicry), where some organisms are part of the lives of others. The philosophy is gaining popularity on all continents, especially in metropolitan areas that set global trends.

Recently I passed by two restaurants in London.

One of them, a vegetarian place, had a queue on the street. The other, a steak house, was empty. International mineral water producers have already begun a transition to biodegradable plastics: Highland Spring already uses such half-liter bottles, and Evian has promised to fully switch to environmentally friendly plastic by 2025. Even Silpo, the Ukrainian supermarket chain, calls on buyers not to use single-use plastic bags.

And the more apparent the climate crisis will be, the higher motivation to act responsibly and demand change we will have.

Companies quickly picked up a trend on ethical consumption. VIGGA offers parents the option to subscribe to clothes for their

babies: when a child grows out of a certain size, the clothes can be easily replaced. Timberland uses old tires to produce footwear, and Pharrell Williams has begun the production of clothing from plastic waste from the ocean.

Another consumer trend is assembled mechanisms, where the necessary parts can be easily replaced by the user. Gerrard Street produces headphones with 85 percent of their components recycled (15,000 tons of headphones end up in landfills every year). The Dutch startup Fairphone uses scrap metals to produce transparent smartphones which can be easily upgraded or repaired by users.

The steel industry also tries to maximise the use of by-products, dropping the extraction of new resources and reducing the product’s final cost. After all, the production of one tonne of steel releases 600 kg of other materials: slag, dust, sludge, as well as carbon, heat and gas.

French car parts manufacturers in Choisyle-Roi have used a reverse supply chain for collecting and reconstructing old parts for the past half a century. These parts cost 30 to 50 percent less for consumers, save 80 percent of electricity, 88 percent of water and 92 percent of chemical products for their production, and generate 70 percent less waste. In the next three years, the Chinese online store JD.com plans to develop a platform for used smartphones with guaranteed quality.

At the state level, circular economy is also becoming popular. China realised its importance back in the 1990s. The Circular Economy Promotion Law of the People's Republic of China passed in 2008, accelerating the breakthrough in sharing services such as car and bike rentals. As a part of the efforts to mitigate waste pollution, the city of Suzhou now requires all local restaurants to give organic waste to a designated recycling company, otherwise they risk losing their license. Milan has also issued its Food Policy Guidelines for 2015-2020, which include a comprehensive range of food waste management measures.

However, the closed-loop economy is not

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just about waste recycling or renewable energy.

Rather, it is about a change of thinking. We are heavily dependent on the society around us, but we often ignore the importance of maintaining and developing connections in it. Scientists are convinced that isolation and unfavorable human environment have a negative impact on our health. The longest study of human happiness, conducted by Harvard University, shows that the quality of relationships with family, friends and the community is the key to our happiness. According to studies by Brigham Young University, separation from social connections reduces life expectancy as much as smoking 15 cigarettes per day and is more dangerous than physical inactivity and air pollution. The American filmmaker Holly Morris discovered that the villagers of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone who returned to the polluted territory after the nuclear incident lived 10 years longer on average than those who did not return and tried to integrate into the society in their new cities.

Sounds pretty general, but aren’t these examples from our own lives enough? Prominent figures from the finance world agree with the scientists. "Do the people you care about love you back?" — this is how the billionaire Warren Buffett formulated the definition of success.

Circular economy is, first of all, about harmony in the society. GDP does not measure the value of the help of a neighbor who brought you medicine from a pharmacy or a stranger who helped to push your car that was stuck in a ditch. According to last year's survey by the Ukrainian Catholic University, Ukrainian immigrants in France put a well-paid job only on the 7th place when they ranked the attractiveness of the new prospects that opened for them. What they valued much more was the possibility of meeting new people, studying a new culture, the freedom of speech, respect for human dignity, inviolability of property, equality before the law. The SCORE Research Index for the United Nations has determined that Ukrainians who do not want to leave their

cities are convinced of the importance of their own role in the local society. Just imagine: all the benefits of moving elsewhere can be neglected only because of the sense of importance and contribution to the community.

Large cities, in fact, only make the process of building a healthy society more difficult. This is an important thing to think about, as by 2050, two thirds of the humanity will live in cities. In the introduction to his memoirs about the British expedition to Antarctica, titled The Worst Journey in the World and published in 1922, crew member Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote, as a more understandable description of the frozen continent, "It is more lonely than London." In the urbanized societies of the United States and China, business schools are starting to teach courses such as the Anthropology of Art, which teach different perspectives on life and help to bring people closer to each other.

In one of his latest podcasts, the Chinese Economist Wu Bofan said that his friend received a hometask at the business school: "To learn more about distant life." At first he started thinking about Mars and other galaxies.

But then he realized that "distant" life was actually nearby. He went to a village to live with a family of a ceramic shop worker. The man’s job was to measure the temperature in the furnace — a function that has long been replaced by technology. The researched later said it was an incredibly useful "distant" journey.

The Circular economy is also an exchange of ideas and perspective. Not a conflict, but an exchange. The Chinese Tang dynasty was able to establish the "Golden Age" because their Emperor was open to new ideas and had advisers from different countries, while the capital city of Chang'an (present-day Xi'an) turned into a hub for various cultures and business practices.

It was the largest city on the planet at the time, with its culture and economy experiencing unprecedented growth. Today, it seems that San Francisco and London are similar places.

In its aspiration for sustainable development which could be successfully measured not

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only by indicators such as the GDP, Ukraine, and Ivano-Frankivsk in particular, should not forget about the critically important "diversity" — a concept that is absent in the Ukrainian language and culture. Just as the well-known linguist Yurii Shevelov could not find the translation of the term "privacy" in Ukrainian, calling the English-Ukrainian dictionaries "useless" for this endeavor, "diversity" has no analogue in our language. It can be translated as "difference," "disparity" or "variety," but none of these options are correct. This word is about the variety of people in the society which provokes us to feel something new, to combine perspectives, to explore and to better understand ourselves. The hype with digital technologies now present in Ukraine will sooner or later slow down and blow over, and we will still have to master the forgotten crafts of everyday life, to continue studying medicine, treat and

teach, develop new technologies and so on. So in order to build a successful circular economy, Ivano-Frankivsk will have to take a comprehensive approach to its own development, which would successfully link various social and economic aspects.

And it is necessary to plan for 30-50 years ahead. So far, this theory is not outdated.

Iryna Shutka, journalist

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The Second Chance How and Why Cities Revitalize Abandoned Structures

"Bringing back to life" is the English translation of the Latin word "revitalization." In architecture and urban studies, it means the re-evaluation of the role of an abandoned structure, building or space and its renovation while preserving its old function or assigning it a new one. This approach allows us to preserve the architectural or cultural heritage of the city, to make the life of its residents more diverse, to motivate new initiatives and local products.

In some European countries, as well as in the US, revitalization processes started 30-40 years ago. The Benelux and Scandinavian countries, Baltic and Western European countries have extensive experience in this field. Others, such as Ukraine, are catching up with the trend only now.

Revitalization can deal with all kinds of structures, and not necessarily in the city.

Sometimes a second life is not just given to an individual building or industrial area, but to whole dismal neighborhoods. For example, October Street in Minsk became a street art center; the Netherlands and Norway are renovating major coastal industrial areas. And one of Europe’s biggest business centers emerged at the location of a former London port on the Isle of Dogs. Ukraine has also made some attempts to think in terms of neighborhoods: a revitalization program has been developed for Pidzamche, a formerly powerful industrial center and currently one of the poorest neighborhoods in Lviv; and Kyiv has some ideas on how to transform Podil, whose considerable part is occupied by former manufacturing facilities.

Revitalization doesn’t have to change the original function of a building or a space. Most often, reanimated industrial areas are repur-

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posed for art and creative industries, parks and campuses. There are plenty of examples: Medialab Prado in Madrid, Art Inkubator (Fabryka Sztuki) in Lodz, the Jatka 78 theatre center in Prague, the festival Mecca of Melkweg in Amsterdam. There are also some projects on a bigger scale: the Kanal – Centre Pompidou in Brussels, at the former site of Citroën garages; or the Kunststad art town that replaced a former shipyard in Amsterdam.

Experience shows that the best option for revitalization is multifunctionality. Because different capacities of a space — for work, life, self-development, leisure — attract different people. The functional content sometimes forms chaotically, but in some cases the content of the project is predefined. For example, the selection of key spheres for Promprylad.

Renovation — urban studies, contemporary art, alternative education and creative businesses — was affected by previous research by CANactions School and Stanford Research Institute International. The concept of the Green Theatre — a renovated amphitheatre in Odesa’s central park — was, according to its creative director Artem Maksymov, determined by the history of the structure (concerts and stage plays were organized there in the past, too), the landscape (a park), the global trends (hence the environmental aspect and the community garden), and the desire to give the city something that it lacks (a comfortable park, a cultural and educational area).

How and Why It Happens (or Doesn’t Happen) Revitalization starts with an idea. And then it can work in different ways. Sometimes the initiators choose the squatting way, that is, "occupy" the space and later legalize it. This was the case with Ufa Fabrіk in Berlin or Arts Printing House in Vilnius. Sometimes the fate of a project is decided by an initiative group. If it weren’t for the Friends of the High Line, the former railway track in New York would not be turned into the famous High Line Park; and if

itweren’t for Saving the Museum of Technology, Vienna would lose the original location in an industrial area. Teams of this kind communicate with relevant government bodies, look for volunteers, sponsors, launch crowdfunding campaigns. But usually revitalization projects have strong teams, business models and strategies; sometimes they are even initiated by city administrations.

In the Ukrainian context — with its lack of government support and proper legal regulations, with its struggle of economic interests — the enthusiasm of the team and the public support sometimes mean a lot. A good example of this is the Green Theatre in Odesa. Since the 1990s, this location, cherished by several generations of Odesa residents, was in decay, and then its existence was threatened by developers. When Impact HUB Odessa took up the project of restoring the structure and managed to make a deal with an investor to rent the space to social initiatives and charity projects, many difficulties emerged in the process: red tape, economic issues, ownership change, and another developer threat.

"At that point, what helped us was a broad public campaign, collecting signatures, and general concern for the future of the Green Theatre," says Artem Maksymov. "In the end, we got a new contract, and now we have to extend it every year. The conditions became quite difficult, but we’re looking for a balance to continue to perform our important social function, to be a place of culture, and at the same time to fit into the harsh financial rules of the game. We have appealed to a wider audience (although we were tempted to appeal to the ‘hipsters’ as a progressive part of the city population). Everyone can find something for themselves in our project: a convenient and comfortable park, a cultural oasis, festivals, an unusual playground with a big sand pit, a food court. All of this allowed us to form an audience, to make the project high-profile and well-functioning for several seasons now."

The Ukrainian projects are most likely to

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work with former industrial areas, for several reasons. These areas are often located in the city center or close to it, frequently near water.

These spaces are usually large, covering the area of tens of thousands of square meters. At the same time, the rent is often low and affordable for beginner entrepreneurs. Industrial areas have all the necessary communications, roads, but both of these infrastructure elements are not always in a satisfactory condition.

In other European countries, the situation is somewhat simpler: revitalization projects can receive government subsidies, EU support, tax benefits for using "green" technology. In Ukraine, industrial facilities are still undervalued. In 2016, participants of the Right to the City seminar identified several reasons for this: — lack of understanding of the value of industrial architecture and the Soviet heritage (industrial facilities in Ukraine usually date back to this period), — low interest on the part of investors, because renovation of industrial areas is a complex and long process, and the profits do not come soon.

Nevertheless, attempts (by the private sector or by foundations) to invest in old walls do exist — and many Ukrainian cities already have their landmark projects. Kyiv probably has the most: Port Creative Hub, UNIT.City, Сloser, IZONE, etc. By the way, not all of them are located in the capital’s center. For example, to get to Platforma Art Factory, you need to travel to the left bank of Dnipro, which did not prevent the location from becoming popular.

Well-known projects in Kharkiv include Fabrica.space IT Hub and Mechanica Art Factory; in Zaporizhia, it’s Loft Mlyn; in Frankivsk, it’s Promprylad.Renovation; in Lviv, !FESTrepublic, Lem Station, Jam Factory and ReZavod.

Walls and People Revitalization projects can take very different forms. But what unites them is the fact that revitalization is not just the result, but the process, too: the created ecosystem is not going to work if people don’t go there, don’t

communicate, don’t bring something of their own. A good illustration is ReZavod in Lviv, basically a grassroots project that revitalized an old industrial area. More than three years ago, the building of a radioelectronic medical equipment factory became a home for several initiatives: Hochu Rayu Design Bureau, BetaLab engineers, and Zelenew Recycling Lab; and by now, it has about 60 "tenants." Among them, there are architects, designers, bakers, photographers, musicians, printers, stylists, teachers and others. Vitaliy Kyryliv, co-founder of ReZavod (Hochu Rayu), tells its story.

"When we were looking for a space for our office and workshop, we decided in favor of the PEMA factory. The place is close to the city center, it has interesting history. But we’re not too attached to the territory: the factory has an owner who can sell it. So the issue of changing the location is relevant for us. In any case, ReZavod is first and foremost an environment, a community of people who interact.

We don’t have any established rules, or a boss.

Our message is that walls are not important, people are. Our strategy is interaction between creativity and business. Fresh ideas are always important for businesses, while funding and understanding of business processes is important for creative people or companies. This kind of cooperation is crucial, because the creative sector in Ukraine is only emerging, it’s only just formalizing, it has no government support."

The success of revitalization projects is, among other things, a matter of communication. It is both about interaction between the stakeholders (the city administration, the owners of buildings, the investors and the project teams) and about communication with the local community. This can be difficult, especially when it’s something new or a bit obscure. For example, residents can sometimes be ambivalent about events related to contemporary art; they can stand up and leave all at once in the middle of a lecture, or have a negative reaction to a performance, as it happened at the Jam Factory in Lviv.

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Bozhena Zakaliuzhna, the manager of the Jam Factory and of Harald Binder Cultural Enterprises, tells us about it.

"The Jam Factory is a contemporary art center (the revitalization works are scheduled to begin at the end of this summer, and the launch of the building is planned for 2021), so our key target audience are people who are interested in contemporary art, who are prepared, in a way. But when we started to work at the location — and the factory building is located in the post-industrial neighborhood of Pidzamche — we began to look at the neighborhood differently, to understand the processes differently.We can’t ignore the place where we are, the history and the social context of the place.

Making programs and projects that have no connection to the locals would be too impudent. So we’re always thinking what we can

offer to the local community and what is, at the same time, interesting for us. Together with the locals, we’ve organized both individual activities and permanent projects, such as Tell Your Story, which involves interviews with former factory workers and neighborhood residents.

The project, for example, included the Dreams about Pidzamche video created by artists and local kids, the work on a parklet that involved constructing a wooden platform and planting plants. Children are an audience that is the easiest to work with, and the play, the joint creation of physical objects, is a good instrument to involve people. In general, the locals have positive attitudes towards the Jam Factory. But their expectations (such as a children’s leisure center) do not match our vision and our contemporary art priority, so the interaction on the ground is not easy, but very important."

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Not a Cure-All, but an Option Not everyone sees the transformation of industrial areas as a cure-all for contemporary cities. Skeptics say that the effects of revitalization, most of all its economic effects, are hard to measure. In addition, the percentage of new jobs created here is small, and staying within old factory walls is not completely safe. Plus, there’s the possibility of gentrification, which in this case is understood mostly as a threat of social stratification, a kind of displacement of the current residents with "creative reformers."

Meanwhile, experience shows that revitalization has positive effects. It often stimulates new startups, small and medium-sized businesses, industrial experiments and collaborations. It can bring capital into a neighborhood.

For example, according to Bozhena Zakaliuzhna, the Jam Factory could become one of the reasons for a developer company to enter the neighborhood, and it could be the city’s motivation to connect Pidzamche to the city center with a cable car.

Clearly, it’s harder to measure the role of exhibitions or lecture halls than to calculate the number of appliances produced and sold

by a factory. Quantitative criteria cannot reveal the whole picture of cultural interaction and social effects, especially the long-term ones.

However, despite all the risks, revitalization projects definitely change the lives of local communities. At the very least, they improve infrastructure and provide more diverse leisure opportunities.

Comments Anastasia Ponomariova, co-founder of Urban Curators, Ukraine The dynamics of (post)industrial revitalization in Ukraine does exist. The easier case for studying it is Kyiv since 2014. Kyiv is a kind of lab researching the question of "what can actually happen to industrial areas."

The city represents a wide range of attitudes to industrial heritage. We have intact ruins from pre-Soviet and Soviet periods. We have temporary chaotic use, where workshops are rented by those who need cheaper floor space.

We have radical transformations with new architecture, forms and functions, such as residential buildings or shopping malls: in this case, the territory loses its face, history. The examples of this are the Bolshevik Factory in the Shuliavka neighborhood, which is now hidden behind the eponymous shopping mall; the Rybalsky Island project, where Lenin’s Forge is slowly disappearing, giving way to a new residential neighborhood. At the same time, there are examples of careful treatment of industrial heritage. These are both small-scale projects, such as Port Creative Hub, IZONE, Closer, and big projects like Platforma Art Factory or UNIT.City. In addition, there are short-term interventions that also work for the purpose of revitalization: GogolFest 2014 in Telychka, CANactions events in industrial areas.

In Kyiv, however, I don’t see the same courage as elsewhere: the intersectoral revitalization of Promprylad.Renovation in Frankivsk, the festivals in industrial areas (such as the Most Fest in Kostiantynivka), which change the negative attitudes to these locations. Visual-

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ly, the capital has a lot, but it’s just physical transformation, the use of buildings and infrastructure, the use of brands of former factories.

There is no intersectoral approach, when the community cooperates with a developer and the city, there is no interaction with cultural, social, historical heritage, no attention to the environmental issue. But these things actually constitute revitalization in a deep sense. In this sense, revitalization is an instrument to solve the problems of a city or a neighborhood (its environmental and infrastructural problems), that is, issues beyond the revitalized industrial area itself.

We at Urban Curators share the in-depth understanding of revitalization. The topic of industry is the focus of our discussions, projects and research. We also decided to try a hybrid approach, which has room both for grassroots projects initiated by us as an organization, and for top-down projects from developers. Revitalization is not the goal for us, it’s a tool for solving urban problems. We involve all kinds of specialists in our projects — architects, designers, economists, social scientists.

This synthesis of knowledge is complex, it takes time, but we see the advantages of this interaction and we believe that ideas developed in this way will yield long-term effects. We implement these approaches in our projects. This is what happened, say, with the Jam Factory competition project in Lviv in 2015. We viewed the factory as the heart of the neighborhood, as a catalyst for the development of the whole Pidzamche; in addition to the spatial solutions, we proposed a well-considered program, which was as flexible as possible and promoted implementation of initiatives and displays of creativity.

Kurth Detlef, professor for Spatial Planning and Environmental Planning at Technical University Kaiserslautern, Germany The models of urban revitalization changed in the last decades in Germany, from radical redevelopment and demolition to careful and socially oriented modernization. Revitalization

in Germany is based on a regulation law (Baugesetzbuch) with guidelines for the regeneration process and rules for residents and landowners.

Also, there is huge funding of about 2 billion euro every year for special revitalization areas (Sanierungsgebiete). The revitalization is implemented by municipalities in collaboration with planning offices and with landowners, with a clear planning process.

There are many very different successful revitalization projects in Germany. The International Building Exhibition in Emscher Park (Ruhr area) invented new strategies to transform old industrial areas. In Mannheim’s Jungbusch, a deprived area was connected to a transformed harbor area with old storage buildings. In Stuttgart’s Fasanenhof, a largescale settlement of the 1960s was renovated, densified and socially stabilized.

Revitalization strategies should always try to maintain abandoned buildings first, to care for urban heritage and historical city structures.

All buildings can be renovated, or transformed for another function; intermediate uses are also possible. Maintenance of existing buildings is important for the social balance of a neighborhood, but also for its cultural identity.

Modernization has to be economical — if it is too expensive, funding or self-made projects can help.

The key to a successful revitalization is cultural understanding and political agreement about the value of the existing building stock.

It is important to involve the main stakeholders of the city, but also the residents of the neighborhood. Revitalization needs clear guidelines, good planning processes, involvement of residents and a long-time implementation strategy.

Anastasia Bobrova, Ivan Verbytsky, CEDOS Think Tank

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Decentralizing the City How to Work with Districts

сік

Officially, districts are the lowest possible level of government in cities. And it is not even mandatory. Cities can decide for themselves if they need to be divided into districts and how they should manage them. For example, Zhytomyr consists of two districts, Bohunsky and Korolyovsky, while Ivano-Frankivsk has no districts at all. Even though these two cities are similar in terms of population and area.

Regardless of whether a city is divided into districts, the Ukrainian law considers all city residents to be a single territorial community. It is the territorial community that has the right to self-government — that is, the powers and opportunities to decide about its local affairs on its own.

For this purpose, it elects a mayor, as well as councilors who form the city council. The council makes all the key decisions in city management, and then they are implemented by the executive committee, which is a collective body that supervises a branching structure of departments, offices and sectors responsible for specific spheres and fields of city life.

It’s actually for the sake of convenience in coordinating the work of these sectoral departments on a certain territory that city councils can create district administrations and divide the city territory among them. Moreover, city councils may pass down to the district level not just their executive, but also their representative functions by creating district councils. This allows city residents to have their representatives making decisions, such as adopting the budget, not only at the level of the whole city, but also below it, at the level of districts. Decisions about creating district councils, as well as decisions about creating districts themselves, are made by every city at its discretion. For example, Kharkiv’s and Dnipro’s districts have such councils, while Lviv’s and Odesa’s don’t.

Regardless of whether a city is divided into districts and whether they have councils, the main principle of city management is by spheres rather than territories. This means that financial and strategic planning is primarily sectoral: landscaping, transportation, education, etc. And then within each of the sectors, they make decisions about which districts need to be developed more. This can have two negative implications. First, city centers receive more resources, because at the level of the whole city, their problems are more visible. Second, integrated approach to territorial development — that is, complex strategic planning that allows the city to be more effective in solving problems whose solutions lie on the intersection of several sectors — hardly even works.

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District Boundaries The problem with official districts in Ukrainian cities is often that their boundaries are cut out in a rather artificial manner. The division doesn’t always take into account the "natural districts," or neighborhoods — the parts of the city which have their own popular names, infrastructure and history of emergence. These can be former estates and suburbs, villages that merged with the city, or residential neighborhoods constructed at the same time. They are often separated from the other parts of the city with spatial barriers, such as highways, railway tracks, rivers, industrial or green areas. In Ivano-Frankivsk, these informal districts include, for example, Kaskad, Bam and Belveder; in Lviv — Ryasne, Levandivka and Zboyishcha; in Kyiv — Vynohradar, Poznyaky, Bereznyaky.

The boundaries of these neighborhoods are often blurred and conditional: different people can imagine them differently. In 2015-17, the City Institute in Lviv implemented the Communities in Action project. The city hall realized that it was better to engage residents in resolving city issues using the territorial principle; however, the official administrative districts combined very different areas, and people who lived there did not feel that they were a single community. A social survey was conducted in the city to find out what the informal districts were. Before the survey, the researchers estimated that there would be 58 districts, but in fact there were 39 — that is, 5-10 informal districts in each administrative district. A similar study in the Obolon District of Kyiv in 2016, conducted by CEDOS Think Tank, found about 8 informal districts.

Each of the 10 administrative districts in Kyiv is home to 200,000-300,000 residents — as many as in an average regional center. The official districts of Kharkiv each have 100,000300,000 residents, and the Lviv districts have 100,000-150,000 residents. These numbers are to high to allow for an active local community to form at this level and for interaction

between neighbors to develop. In contrast to administrative districts, informal districts are more homogenous and integrated. This level is the most suitable to work on evaluating and improving the quality of life and the city infrastructure. The study which was part of the Communities in Action project revealed that, in the residents’ opinion, there are more shared problems at the level of informal rather than formal districts.

For example, Kyiv has the Podilsky Administrative District. To put it simply, it consists of three parts: Podil, Kurenivka and Vynohradar.

The biggest problem of Vynohradar, built in the 1970s-1980s, is its bad access to transportation; however, for the historic Podil, which has three subway stations, this problem is not relevant. Kurenivka, in turn, is actually divided between two administrative districts. It has the animal market, whose neighbors don’t feel safe and speak about a threat of marginalization.

One of the options for resolving this problem can be to arrange high-quality public spaces in Kurenivka: they attract all kinds of people and motivate them to spend time outside, and the presence of "eyes on the street" improves the feeling of safety. However, it is hard to implement this idea, because the landscaping services of the two administrative districts do not coordinate their work, especially in the case of developing these peripheral territories.

Quality of Life Differences in the quality of life are lower when districts are socially diverse. If people from different backgrounds and with different social statuses live in mixed communities rather than separately, it reduces the likelihood of developing social inequalities and promotes the uniform development of the society. Ukrainian cities are quite even in terms of social diversity, while cities in many other countries are clearly divided into wealthy neighborhoods for the rich and disadvantaged neighborhoods for the poor. The segregation leads to safety problems and unequal access

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to social services — education, health care, culture.

Although the Soviet Union had a hierarchy of privileges in terms of housing distribution, it did not develop such a sharp division into wealthy and low-income neighborhoods as in the US or in Latin American countries. Still, after the transition to capitalism, Ukrainian cities started to build gated apartment complexes or even whole neighborhoods, such as Comfort Town or Novopecherski Lypky in Kyiv. They have separate internal infrastructure and are closed for free passage.

To prevent segregation — the division of neighborhoods into elite and disadvantaged ones — we can use such instruments as mandatory social housing quotas in all new residential developments or prioritization of the least developed neighborhoods while distributing budget funding.

The quality of life in the districts is also affected by their multifunctionality. It means the presence of not just housing, but also workplaces, education, health care and social facilities, trade and entertainment, public spaces and administrative buildings. If a neighborhood is only residential and has only residential buildings, its residents will have to satisfy all their other needs in other areas of the city.

This increases the time and money they spend on travel, negatively affects congestion in public transportation and on the roads, and puts people in unequal conditions depending on their place of residence.

Communities People get the most attached to everyday things: their building entrance, block, street.

Everything they encounter on their way to work, to their kids’ daycare school, gym, cinema, park, or to the market. People understand the problems of their neighborhoods, they know what needs to be improved and where; that is, they can be competent in terms of territory development. That is why it is the most reasonable to engage them in decision making

at this level in particular: to invite them to participate in public discussions or public hearings, to elect district councilors, or to choose the priorities for city budget spending. The same applies to informing: news about water cutoffs, renovations in the park or opening a coffee shop will be the most interesting for the people who live or spend a lot of time nearby.

Neighborhoods are places where local communities, united by shared ties, are created. They are the basis for local activism, joint solving of problems and self-government.

The Communities in Action project determined the following factors that affect the creation of local communities: — residents’ identification with a certain territory; — their desire to solve shared problems and belief that it is possible; — their trust in others; — their awareness of shared problems and needs; — spaces where the community could interact; — personal contacts, meeting and communicating with neighbors; — practices of civil activism — previous experience of joint action.

CEDOS’s research in the Obolon District of Kyiv found that for 72 percent of the respondents it was important to live in their particular neighborhood. And the people who joined civil activities more often also valued their place of residence more. The Citizens in Action study showed that 82 percent of Lviv residents knew people who lived in the same building as they did, and 66 percent talked to them and occasionally spent time with them. People who maintained connections with neighbors were more active in their neighborhood’s civil life.

However, only 36 percent of the respondents trusted their neighbors who lived in the same building.

The identification of neighborhoods and the formation of communities are affected by having certain symbols in the neighborhood.

These can include prominent buildings or

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landmarks, streets or factories, parks and green areas, and water reservoirs, such as rivers and lakes. For example, the Santa Barbara neighborhood in Lviv got its name from the shopping mall whose facade is decorated with arches similar to the arches from the eponymous TV show. Ivano-Frankivsk has a neighborhood called Positron, named after a factory, and the Pasichna neighborhood, named after a street.

Some of the most important symbols of Obolon in Kyiv are the local Dnipro shore and the system of lakes where the locals like to spend their leisure time.

If the residents feel attached to their neighborhood and want to solve its problems, know people who live nearby and do something together from time to time, it means that the neighborhood has the potential to form an active community. If a problem appears, the community will be able to respond to it quickly and demand that government agencies satisfy their needs. The more effectively this happens, the better the quality of life in the neighborhood will be. And the better the quality of life, the more the neighborhood’s residents will be satisfied with their life in it.

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Olha Perekhrest, editor-in-chief at the Kufer online journal

Scanning the Neighborhood

What Can Be Found on the Map around Promprylad

To figure out a city’s map (or a map of one of its neighborhoods), you should start with looking for its key "nods." Such as a central street, a square, a railway station or a crossroads.

In the case of the neighborhood around the Promprylad factory, you can start with the cemetery.

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A Bit of History of Frankivsk’s Development Ihor Panchyshyn, the Frankivsk architect who initiated the creation of the Department for Protecting the Cultural Heritage of Ivano-Frankivsk and formerly served as its head, says that to figure out why a certain city neighborhood is what it is, you should start from the very beginning. That is, start with the whole history of city planning.

"The whole city grew in concentric circles.

At first, there was a fortress here. Then, in the 19th century, a city started developing around it," says Ihor Panchyshyn.

The city grew the only way it could: its growth was determined by rivers, the railway track, and the main roads that crossed it — the roads to Lviv, Ternopil, Nadvirna, etc.

The Independence Street became the central axis of the city; a "second center" has grown around it. A part of the city — between today’s Mazepa and Konovalets Streets — was built according to a clear plan, and impressive buildings sprung up all around it.

In 1866, a railway station opened in the city, so industry started growing around the railway track — warehouses, workshops and factories. On one side of the railway track grew the neighborhood of Maizli, where the workers lived. On the other side, there was the German Colony, a residential area with neat single-story villas and small blocks.

Beyond the city boundaries, in the southwest, a military base was located. In the northeast, there was the city cemetery, operating since the late 18th century. Both civilians and military servicemen were buried here; according to Ihor Panchyshyn, there were Romanian, German, Hungarian, Polish graves, as well as the graves of soldiers from the Ukrainian Galician Army and the graves of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen.

However, after World War II, when the Soviet Union came to power, the cemetery was closed, and burials were moved out of the city boundaries again. And in the 1980s, its role as a cemetery ended completely: the majority of the

necropolis was destroyed, and the cemetery’s territory was transformed into a park. Nevertheless, even when it was closed, the cemetery continued to influence the neighborhood.

The thing is, explains the architect, that the Austrian government of that time understood that an area must be reserved for burials. But when the cemetery shut down, the reserved field turned out to be unnecessary. Well, the city also changed in that time — now it needed new houses instead of a cemetery.

"First they closed the cemetery; it was supposed to grow sideways. But because of industrialization in the second half of the 1960s and in the 1970s, they started to develop the area.

That is when the Promprylad neighborhood started to grow," says Ihor Panchyshyn.

This neighborhood also had another chance to find itself in the center of attention. The area around the drama theater could have become the city’s administrative center, its government area — with a building for the Party’s Regional Committee and a Lenin statue. The "official" complex also included the theater — basically the only building that was actually constructed, the only implemented part of the plan.

"The German kirche that stood next to the cemetery was torn down, because they wanted to build a big square. But they never did it, because this is a city exit, a busy highway. But however you look at it, this square is still a Lenin Square, regardless of whose statue you install in it — Ivan Franko’s or anyone else’s.

Because it was originally created that way," deliberates the architect.

The Heart of the Neighborhood As a part of the festival, the organizers of the City Scanning Session will model a situation where the neighborhood around the factory could be an island. Because this neighborhood basically has everything you need in life. You can be born here in the maternity hospital on Chornovil Street, go to school here (Schools No. 12 or 21), get a degree at the Institute of

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Arts, King Danylo University or the National Academy of Internal Affairs, go for a walk near one of the two lakes, play tennis, go to the theater and work — at the Promprylad factory (in the older times) or, for example, in SoftServe (today).

Of course, this list does not exhaust the neighborhood’s possibilities. It also has enough stores, cafes; there’s even a Central Office of the National Police. In this relatively small territory, Khrushchev-era apartment buildings, Polish villas and contemporary residential houses coexist.

"The central axis of the neighborhood, both visually and in terms of traffic, is Melnyk Street. It is not highlighted in any way, but the whole factory depends on it. The next most important spots are the theater and the cemetery," says Ihor Panchyshyn.

The Promprylad factory is just as prominent on the map — after all, around 4,000 people used to work here. And now, thanks to the revitalization, new communities of residents come and gather in this place.

"If a neighborhood has a beating heart, people will come," says the architect.

According to Ihor Panchyshyn, the neighborhood historically tended to be industrial: it had sculpture workshops where stone was cut for the cemetery, it had a metal casting facility and other workshops. And the location of today’s school stadium was then a brick factory. Now the only reminder of its existence is the lake between Slava Stetsko and Sakharov streets, near School No. 21 (the so-called Tseholka — now it’s the lake with a swan). It used to be a quarry that provided for the needs of the brick factory.

When the Soviet Union came, it began to transform the city’s manufacturing for the needs of the military. This spurred the development of residential construction (more workers means more housing). For example, the first Frankivsk "Khrushchevkas" were built along Sakharov Street, and the boiler-welding plant constructed two-story cottag-

es for its workers at today’s 63 Slava Stetsko Street.

"In the 1990s, it turned out that the world was changing. Because Ivano-Frankivsk used to be a military city. And now it turns out that that the army is no longer relevant, no more rockets are needed, and no nuclear weapons.

And the abandonment of nuclear weapons directly affected our city. Because nuclear weapons mean warehouses, command facilities, bunkers and so on," says the architect. He adds: "Then they passed a strategic city plan which presumed that the factories would die.

They defined transit tourism and the research potential as the city’s resources. But it was a strategy of creating comfort for someone else, not for us."

The ruined planned economy, with its factories and state procurement, no longer brought any money to the city. So Frankivsk discovered a new way to make money: residential construction.

"The city is squeezed, it has no room for expansion," reminds Ihor Panchyshyn. "So it starts to grow inside."

And now every vacant land plot becomes potentially attractive for developers.

"Does it benefit the city if only the residential construction is developing?"

"The city is not a benefit in and of itself.

Breathing the air in the field, drinking clean water in the mountains is more beneficial. A city is created to intensify tension. The more dynamics, the bigger the spark. But conflicts are not bad. Harmony is actually about combining different tensions."

In the past five years, Frankivsk has been trying to adopt a General Plan. The document should predict the city’s development for the next 25 years: define its priorities, delineate its development strategy — and finally, determine what needs to be constructed and where. And the local rethinking of neighborhoods should be a part of the general course.

But the city government doesn’t seem to manage to do it.

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33

6 polish modernism (30s–40s)

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7 lake with swan 8 workers setlement 1960

REBETA

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The German Colony The neighborhood that used to be the end of Frankivsk’s territory, with a factory that is undergoing renovation, surrounded by residential buildings — what can it use to distinguish itself from other parts of Ivano-Frankivsk?

In Ihor Panchyshyn’s opinion, its distinguishing feature could be the German Colony.

It could become the neighborhood’s brand.

This area of single- and two-story villas was built in the same period as the city’s whole industrial area — after the railway track opened. The Austro-Hungarian empire encouraged Protestant Germans to move to Stanislaviv for work. They settled with their families around today’s Kyiv, Bandera and Lepky streets. The neighborhood was soon named the German Colony, because its residents, despite being Austrian subjects, still called themselves Germans.

"The colony itself emerged in the 19th century. When the railway was built in the 1860s, the industry that grew around it needed people, who settled nearby. The German Colony did not have clear boundaries, but it stretched between the railway area and the center. The whole city was developing, but this area was

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industrial area

left to the workers," explains the architect.

These streets still have many villas with gardens that preserve the air of a quiet, cozy town that is provincial in a good sense. However, we need to draw attention to the Colony as soon as possible, before the mass construction of high-rises starts here as well.

To make a city attractive for tourists, we need to protect its historical heritage. The tourism capacity of Frankivsk is not unlimited, because the city itself is small. So we need to fight for every historic area and protect it (while we still have something to protect).

"I wish we could persuade everyone that the German Colony is an architectural reserve.

Its architecture, streets, villas are special. We should raise this issue before the city government, so they create zoning laws for such things as reserve areas, giving them protected status. This is completely in the local government’s power. To defend it from excessive construction. It should be a protected area of small residential buildings that are characteristic of Frankivsk in particular. People could open restaurants or stores there. This way, the whole neighborhood could become attractive," insists Ihor Panchyshyn.

Anastasia Bobrova, Ivan Verbytsky, CEDOS Think Tank

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Right to the City What Is Participation?

Larry Diamond, a Stanford theorist of democracy, includes participation in his four key elements of democracy, together with protecting the rights of all citizens, replacing government through free and fair elections, and the rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to everyone.

Not long before the 1968 revolution, the Marxist social scientist Henri Lefebvre introduced the concept of "the right to the city." He wrote that urban space was turning into a product, and that city functions were being reduced to consumption. As a result, the needs of ordinary residents, students and the working class remained outside the city managers’ attention. "The right to the city," in turn, means the possibility of co-creating the urban space. To realize this right, the interests of city residents must be taken into account while planning and making strategic decisions.

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What Participation Can Look Like In 2009, the Council of Europe developed the Code of Good Practice for Civil Participation in the Decision-Making Process. It distinguishes four levels of citizen engagement depending on their effectiveness: Information is the lowest level, where government bodies tell the public about their decisions or projects, and publish all the necessary data and documents. It is a rather unilateral process which does not require active feedback. However, it’s the first step towards further effective civil participation. Examples of information include open data, access to state registries, publishing orders on the president’s official website, spreading information via newspapers and television.

Consultations are used when the government needs to learn the public’s opinion about a certain policy, topic or phenomenon. These can be public hearings, social surveys, and complaints or electronic petitions. Consultations may be single-time. Their goal is not to draft a final decision, but to collect data and suggestions for the responsible government body.

Dialogue — government bodies do not just learn about the positions of residents, but also share their own work. This kind of engagement implies regularity and is outcome-oriented. Examples of dialogue are annual meetings of joint commissions or working groups, and the work of some public councils.

Partnership is joint development and implementation of decisions and policies. Government bodies delegate some of their powers to civil society organizations who start to play a crucial role. However, the criteria and procedures for this kind of involvement must be transparent, accessible and comprehensible.

The most prominent example of partnership in Ukrainian cities is the public budget.

Not all decisions require "deep" forms of engagement. In 2015, Kyiv hosted a Right to the City seminar whose participants developed a new model of civil participation in the

sphere of city planning. They concluded that information is required at all stages of decision making. While choosing the city’s Chief Architect, consultation is sufficient. In turn, partnership is needed mostly only in developing and amending city planning regulations: general plans, zoning plans or detailed territory plans.

The Council of Europe proposes to evaluate participation using the CLEAR mechanism, developed in 2011. To do this, we need to answer several questions: — Do people have the proper conditions, resources, skills and knowledge for civil participation? Do they have convenient premises or other infrastructure for engaging in participation?

— Do people feel they are a part of the community? Do they have emotional attachment to their place of residence? Do they know their neighbors, are they part of the local communities?

— Do people have opportunities for participation? How often are they actually involved in decision making? Is there an established system of dialogue between the government and the people?

— Have people been informed about the opportunities for engagement in due time, in a high-quality and accessible manner?

— Do people see the possibility to actually influence decision making?

How Participation Works Civil participation can take different forms: open data, referendums, voting, public discussions, petitions, public budgeting, architectural competitions, etc. Kyiv, for example, has over 20 different instruments of participation.

But not all of them are equally effective and inclusive. Some, such as the local referendum, do not work because of gaps in legislation.

Others, such as public councils, work differently with different government bodies.

CEDOS studies in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv show that participation in Ukrainian cities

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is not systemic. One of the key barriers to involving residents in city management is mutual distrust, stereotypes and mismatch between the expectations of government bodies and of the civil society.

The public complains about indifference and ineffectiveness of officials. The officials shrug, saying that city residents have poor understanding of the city management system.Both sides have to experience traumatic conflict situations in the process of interaction. All of this kills the government bodies’ will to interact with residents in the future.

The problems also include poor communication and late involvement. City residents do not always receive well-justified and to-thepoint answers to their complaints and appeals.

Government bodies do not always inform them about engagement opportunities on time, and do not always explain their actions.

Participation is often brought in only when the decision has actually already been developed and approved within the government body, when the draft document already exists, and people can only make minor amendments to it. Even if a government body does officially support a proposal from city residents, it does not always reach the stage of implementation: the process of implementing decisions takes a long time and is not transparent.

Participation is easier to manipulate if the only way to receive feedback from the people is voting. There were cases in Kyiv when developers brought full buses of "titushkas" or bribed participants to public hearings so they could raise their hands in favor of the decisions which the developer needed to pass.

Voting leaves no opportunities for seeking consensus and understanding: one side wins, the other loses completely — there will always be someone whose interests are not taken into account. To collect a lot of signatures or votes, major resources are needed. This is a barrier for minorities and vulnerable social groups, and that’s why it is their needs that are not taken into account when decisions are

made by a majority. To get a quality result, it’s important to consider the arguments for a position rather than the number of its supporters, even if the well-justified position is not supported by many votes.

Why We Need Participation Participation increases the legitimacy of decisions. By involving the people, government bodies can share their responsibility. City residents value the things that they’ve helped to develop much more. If there is an opportunity to affect a decision before it is made, and if the government body actually gives well-justified answers to all the proposals it receives, then it’s less likely that the decision will make people want to go out to the streets in protest. The participatory decision will be more sustainable.

If all stakeholders are involved in its development, the document will work regardless of whether the official who signed it is replaced.

Participation opens the opportunity to look for better solutions. The more people can participate, the more data, ideas and opinions we will have, and the more complete picture will be available to the responsible government bodies. It is especially important to involve those who will be affected by a decision or policy or whose interests it will concern. Government bodies may not always understand and feel the needs of all social groups and all city neighborhoods. These are normal limitations of human perception. That is why, to reduce their negative effect, we need to listen to the residents who have relevant experiences and who will later be affected by the decision when it is made.

In information technology, this is called "user experience design" (or "UX design").

To make interfaces as convenient as possible, developers constantly let their users test them.

The users are the ones who can reveal shortcomings and show how new developments will be used in practice, in real life. In urban space, an example of this approach is legalization of well-trodden paths in parks and yards. Another

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example are diagonal crossings at crossroads: they are more convenient and reduce the waiting time at traffic lights.

As we plan participation, we need to keep in mind that some social groups are systematically excluded from the decision making process and the urban space. These include, in particular, homeless people, internally displaced people, the Roma community, people with disabilities, teenagers, elderly people. Sometimes some of them just physically cannot take part in participatory events. Some have no access or do not know how to use the Internet. Others experience financial hardship and cannot leave their jobs for a few hours. Parents with young children do not always have someone to babysit their kids while they go to a meeting. And buildings where discussions are held are not always accessible for people with disabilities.

The levels of interest in solving city problems are also uneven. However, to make

high-quality decisions, we often need to find out the opinions of those who cannot (or do not want to) engage in participation on their own, and take their opinions into account.

The task of government bodies is to know and reckon with all these circumstances when they plan their events and programs. They need to offer different participation opportunities, and to reach out to people for information, without waiting for them to see the relevant announcement on the City Council’s Facebook page. Special attention must be paid to engaging the most vulnerable social groups and taking their needs into account. They have the lowest resources which they can use to claim their rights by themselves. However, fair urban development requires their needs to be a particular priority. If a city is comfortable for its least privileged residents, it will be more comfortable for everyone.

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Anna Potyomkina, art historian, curator of Asortymentna Kimnata gallery

From Confrontation to Doubt The Strengths and the Weaknesses of Participatory Art

An illegal immigrant is unsurely criticizing an artist in front of a camera. The man volunteered to take part in a performance by the Belgian artist Benjamin Verdonck. The purpose of the project is to draw attention to the issue of refugees and people without citizenship. For this, the artist constructed a cardboard house in the middle of a street and painted it with slogans. During this performance in Antwerp, illegal immigrants handed out leaflets, but the man in front of the camera was dissatisfied and offended by the artistic design. In his opinion, the leaflets, written in childish handwriting, looked rather unconvincing, and this meant that his serious situation was not taken seriously. Before this same camera, Verdonck explains that childish handwriting is just an element of his artistic style.

This story is a typical example of art that goes beyond the boundaries of a museum or a gallery and becomes socio-politically engaged. The confrontation between the ethical and the aesthetical, the participatory and the spectacular, the critical and the utopian, the social and the artistic is something that is faced by participatory art working with communities.

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What Is Participatory Art and How Did It Arise?

Today, the expanded field of post-studio practice has different names: in addition to participatory, it is also socially engaging art, community art, experimental communities, dialogical, interventional, collaborative or contextual art and, more recently, social practice.

Participatory art is a rather broad concept.

But its prominent feature is direct engagement of the audience in the process and joint creation. Participation does not always involve working with communities, but this kind of practice today seems to stir the most active controversy in the arts field.

Artists, who have worked alone for centuries, suddenly began to attract the public and to interfere in the socio-political sphere. This focus on the social context over the last decade has grown into a global phenomenon: from North and South America to South-East Asia and Russia. The reason for these shifts is related to the so-called "social turn" in the art world, whose manifesto was first articulated by the art historian Claire Bishop. In her essay The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents (2006), she points out that the social trend has been on the rise since the 1990s and is generally related to the critique of artistic production and consumption under capitalism.

The Scandinavian artist Johanna Billing brings young people together through music in their videos (Project for a Revolution, 2000; Magical World, 2005); the Dutch artist and curator Jeanne van Heeswijk transforms the mall of a small town in the Rotterdam area into a cultural center (De Strip 2001-2004); Katerina Seda from the Czech Republic initiates a "community game," a one-day program of activities for the inhabitants of a small village who regret that nothing happens in their hometown (There's Nothing There, 2003); Sharon Hayes from New York holds participatory events with LGBT communities in the United States (Revolutionary Love, 2008); Tania Bruguera from Cuba creates performances with blind

people (Consummated Revolution, 2008); the Polish artist Pawel Althamer organizes weekly ceramics classes in Warsaw for people with special needs. And the list of such projects is not exhausted.

Social vs. Artistic It is remarkable that the social turn also provoked an ethical turn in art criticism and sparked a new controversy. Proponents of the social discourse have started to judge the work of artists as a good or bad model of collaboration, depending on whether it develops into any form of exploitation and whether it is effective for the community.

In contrast, the artistic discourse accuses the social one of stubborn attachment to existing categories and concentration on micro-political gestures. Thus, either the social consciousness or the individual's right to question social consciousness dominates. The interconnection of the artistic and the social is either supported by morality or based on freedom.

The example of Verdonck’s project that was mentioned above shows how difficult it is to balance the interests of the community and the arts.

From the Western European perspective, the confrontation between the social and the artistic is symptomatic and tends to increase during periods of political transition and upheaval— for example, after the revolution of 1917, during the years of Italian fascism, and after the social transformations of 1968. At each of these stages, the engagement of communities took on a different form, reflecting on the relevant socio-political problems. According to Claire Bishop, the revival of the participatory format in our time is associated with the consequences of the collapse of Communism in 1989, the lack of a viable left-wing alternative, the emergence of the modern "post-political" consensus and the almost complete marketisation of art and education.

The paradox of this situation, according to the researcher, is that participation is now be-

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coming more and more related to the populist programs of neoliberal governments. Although participatory artists consistently oppose neoliberal capitalism, the values ​​they attribute to their work are often interpreted too formally, and their aspects are perfectly suited to the recent forms of neoliberalism (network, mobility, project work, affective labour).

The State Will Pay The contemporary practice of community art also becomes the object of criticism for the Belgian sociologist Pascal Gielen. Returning to the example of Verdonck, which Gielen mentions in one of his works, another pitfall becomes noticeable. The artist’s public performance was one of a series of his interventions in Antwerp, which all became part of a documentary. At the beginning of the film, we see the following scene: at a meeting of the city’s cultural and political figures, the artist enthusiastically announces his idea of an ac​​ tion. The mayor of Antwerp is also present at the event. He nods in approval, says a word of encouragement and leaves the meeting with a carefree smile. The government gave the artist a "green light" for committing several subversive acts. The author then raises a question, Is it possible for government-funded community art to retain any subversive power?

According to the researcher Gregory Sholette, the danger of neutralizing the critical and subversive nature of participatory practices lies in the fact that today these practices are coming out of the periphery. Instead, they quickly become institutional and legitimate.

The paradox of this situation is that, on the one hand, artists and cultural centers receive funding for projects, and on the other hand, they face their own instrumentalization.

In recent years, this problem has been felt most acutely in the countries of Western Europe, where government funding for art is a common practice. For example, this year's topic of the TEH Conference #87 (Trans European Halles, a European network of cultural

centers), which took place in Dresden, was participation. One of the themes of discussion was the question of autonomy from neoliberal policies that encourage participatory projects, but use them, often through the cultural initiatives themselves, for their own purposes.

Representatives of various art centers feel that in recent years they have turned into social workers and are doing audience development.

Gregory Sholette, who was already mentioned above, says that "community arts appear to substitute artist-generated services for genuine public services, thus reforming rather than fundamentally transforming offensive political inequalities that have only grown more extreme over the past thirty years, thanks to the anti-government policies of neoliberal, deregulated capitalism. Following the collapse of the world financial market this ‘replacement strategy’ of artist service providers for actual social services seems to have accelerated in the US and UK in particular as governments look for ways to cut public spending. As we well know, artists work cheap.

Unionized social workers, educators, therapists do not."

The Ukrainian Context of Participatory Practices These problematic aspects of participatory community arts are seemingly not felt yet in the current Ukrainian context, at least because of the fact that for many of us, "participatory" is still a new word. But it's worth to be aware, even now, of the underlying pitfalls, and to learn how they can be avoided, so we don’t repeat the mistakes of other cultural structures.

Logically, the question may arise here, Is it worth at all to interfere in the social and political arena if the danger of losing autonomy is always near? Of course, everyone has the right to his/her own answer, but if you look closer, politics and art, while different in terms of their systemic structure, still exist in a shared field, the field of visibility. And if the role of politics in this field is to maintain the given order, the

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role of art is always to question that order.

Today, the initiatives and programs that do not just work with communities but also are critical of this practice and aware of all the risks are particularly valuable. One such program will soon be held in Ivano-Frankivsk as a part of the City Scanning Session.

We Are Never Alone residence, curated by the Metasitu Anti-Growth Institute, was built on the very idea of ​​redefining participation in urban space. How can collective strategies, tactics and approaches facilitate interaction between current (and former?) workers in post-industrial areas and the neighborhoods around them? How can participatory practices functionally expand discourses and ensure social justice without resorting to stereotypes? How

can these practices contribute to understanding the territory of Ivano-Frankivsk? Which resources are available to artistic interventions that introduce social justice, and what are their limitations? Are there any doubts about their appropriateness?

The invited residents from different countries and with different artistic, architectural and urbanist backgrounds will work on these difficult issues for a month. By interacting with the Prompylad territory and the surrounding areas through their own research and activities, the members of the residence will try to identify the social ties that already exist there. And maybe to establish unpredictable new ones.

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Alexander Shevchenko, co-founder of the Comixans urban group, curator of the zero year of the Kharkiv School of Architecture curator

Outposts of Digitization

In the past ten years, the Ukrainian language has adopted so many neologisms that even the people who follow modern trends and progress sometimes cannot catch up with them and have to clarify what exactly a certain word means. Today, especially with the development of creative industries and the return of new manufacturing to the city, there is more and more demand for materials, components, and products custom-made for a very specific purpose and use. For example, special appliances for cheese factories for ageing cheeses, or machines for a carpentry workshop that manufactures race boats.

A new and trendy kind of laboratory, the fab lab, is a response to this demand.

Fab labs, or fabrication laboratories, were conceived as a format to inspire people and entrepreneurs to create new prototypes and products using the available manufacturing equipment.

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The Beginning of the Fabber Era The original idea belongs to Neil Gershenfeld, a professor and researcher at MIT, the leading American tech university in Boston.

The university is regularly featured in the top ten best universities of the world, and it is the leader among tech colleges. Prof. Gershenfeld’s idea was simple: to provide an environment, skills, materials and technologies for doing things quickly and cheaply anywhere in the world. This opportunity, according to his concept, could be used by local entrepreneurs, students, artists — anyone who can create something new and innovative.

As of December 2017, 1,205 fab labs had been registered all over the world. Some of them are united in tight networks which eagerly keep in contact with each other.

Ardent Fablabbers If you try to tell an enthusiastic fablabber that it is just a workshop with tools, you will almost definitely hear this in response: "No, it’s a network of related fab labs all over the world where people share blueprints, prototypes, and share the values of co-creation and open source code."

What is inside a fab lab? A fab lab is a collection of power tools and electronic devices, equipment that seems to come from a big factory, and specially written software for working with all this equipment.

As I’ve already mentioned, fab labs became the most popular among beginner entrepreneurs, makers and craftspeople; but soon, fab labs across the world saw the return of the audience that started it all — students. Today, the 3D printer, as a fab lab symbol, also attracts the younger generation of high school students, teenagers and college students, helping them to solve their study tasks and just to experiment.

The fab lab’s motto might as well be: "Do and produce anything you want, rather than what’s available on the supermarket shelves."

What is the phenomenon of this lab and how is it different from a regular workshop? The fab

lab brings together very different people, communities, businesses in the same space. Together, they create a very productive and effective mix that can generate many new products.

For example, on the basis of one fab lab, Norwegian shepherds once created a system for tracking their own sheep with their cell phones; in Ghana, fablabbers invented a truck refrigeration system that uses the truck’s own exhaust fumes as fuel. In South Africa, they even created a computer with internet access which can be attached to a regular TV set and costs $10.

You can create almost anything in the fab lab space, except for things that are directly harmful or cause harm to anyone. Anyone who comes to a fab lab must master certain skills for using the equipment, and then effectively share the lab space with the rest of the members.

For example, in Fabulous St. Pauli, a fab lab in Hamburg, an initiative group taught 100 Syrian migrants how to make cell phones out of easily available components.

Fab Culture One of the special characteristics of the fab lab — both as a space and as a phenomenon — is that the form of process organization and the product design must be available for individual reproduction; but intellectual rights regulations can now also be applied here.

The rule is that commercial activities can be incubated in fab labs, but they must not contradict the idea of a free space and free access to equipment. That is why these new startups must grow further outside the fab lab walls, rather than inside. Otherwise the permanently open fab lab spaces and the manufacturers in them would have difficulties with providing mass, constant and systematic access to the equipment used by all the other co-workers.

Fab Labs across the World Today, fab labs can be found in almost any country in the world. And while the equipment inside the fab labs may vary, the classic funding

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and management model tied to the country of operation does not exist. You could not say that a Dutch fab lab is substantially different from a French one.

However, the question about the function and purpose of this format of production in cities should be asked in advance. Many fab lab managers and founders believe that this format is the most effective for community activation and quick repurposing on a local scale.

For example, in the Netherlands or in France, fab labs are often integrated with education institutions. And not only with universities, but also with secondary schools. It would not be strange to see 12 or 13-year-old teenagers who teach 70-year-old people how to use 3D printers. This scene is typical, in particular, for Kaasfabriek, a Dutch fab lab that functions in only seven shipping containers.

Organizational Models of Fab Labs In terms of the forms of funding and founding, fab labs can be categorized into three groups: — with government (budget) funding: a city/ municipality sees an absolutely positive opportunity for activating urban entrepreneurship, youth and small businesses via fab labs; — with private founders: these are often collectives that become the core of a fab lab, developing a circle of followers and customers around them; — public fab labs: when the needs of a lab are covered by funding collected from various sources (businesses, grants, crowdfunding), and its account is managed by an NGO. Fab lab managers, crafters and founders often observe that as soon as government funding for the project runs out, everything starts to go downhill. This rather natural process can be explained by different understanding of the purpose of a fab lab. If its purpose is to activate as many residents as possible, then financial stability develops when the activated users create an "avalanche effect," and then it does not really need to be nourished anymore.

The natural growth of the user base provides sufficient income to cover the key costs.

However, if the idea of a fab lab is to serve a particular sphere or industry (such as wood processing or photovoltaics), then it has to have an inbuilt model for generating funding which will cover the lab’s costs in the end, so that there is no need for the "trickle-down" funding anymore.

These two paths are linked to the fab lab’s sources of income. The classical options for income generation in a fab lab are subscription and per-hour fees. Anything else can be improvised, and each fab lab develops its own system adapted to its specific situation.

Fabricator, the Kyiv fab lab, in addition to the subscription and per-hour rent models, also works with the business sector: it helps businesses with prototyping or manufactures unique items for the fashion industry or jewelry.

Meanwhile, Dutch garage fab labs in Utrecht and a few other cities rent individual workshop slots to makers, which allows them to generate regular income. These makers include, for example, engineers that produce solar-powered race boats.

From the market perspective, fab labs are in the same competitive field as mass production.

In consumer goods and materials manufacturing, fab labs have demonstrated their ability to provide individual makers with opportunities to create useful devices and appliances for their work. The difference between fab lab products and the general mass market is that these products are individualized, personified and customized for specific situational needs.

The Future of Fab Labs The fab lab also makes progress and develops: it does not remain exclusively a platform for makers, but also becomes a systemic element in STEM education — that is, science, technology, engineering and maths education.

We see that combining the opportunities provided by fab labs with contemporary trends can yield fundamentally new methods of use, and

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therefore, methods for filling the operational budget.

What awaits fab lab in the future? They are the outposts of digitization. We are moving on from making components using machines to making components of machines by machines, to machines that reproduce themselves, to building with digital materials, to programmed materials that can transform depending on the task at hand. And all of this is now possible not only in a secret lab in the Swiss mountains, but anywhere in the world. The fab lab expands access to technology, innovation and practical manufacturing, reaching out to the wider audience, rural as well as urban.

A prominent example is FabLab Comtois in Burgundy. It is actually a whole network of rural fab labs in the Burgundy countryside, which all have their own focus, such as woodworking or electronics and small business support.

For example, one of the fab labs quite quickly solved the issue of salmon smoking appliances for the local farmers.

Across the ocean, in Brazil, the Sao Paulo city administration created a network of 15 labs to democratize access to technology. Thus, very different audiences are equal when they first enter the fab lab.

Bart Bakker, the founder of MiniFabLab in Utrecht, says that "The fablab acts more like a catalyst. Its effect is stronger in this, rather than in the general movement as such."

One of the beacons of the global fab lab movement is the BCN fab lab in Barcelona. For the past 12 years, it has been integrated in a university and actively involved in the students’ project work. This fab lab does a great deal of current work in natural resources and technology integration, and works to develop global solutions for the whole world. It was here that the first autonomous solar-powered house was created. Its design was immediately published as open source code and can be accessed freely.

A fab lab can also play an interesting role in creative industries. Let’s imagine a situation when we need to receive an exhibition from

London in Ivano-Frankivsk, and in addition to the core exhibits we also need many support structures which would be unreasonable to import from England. This is where a fab lab and open source design code can come in handy. This way, the space will be ready for the exhibition even before the exhibits arrive in Frankivsk.

Fab labs, in the wider sense of production in the city, can become the activators, the points where people gather and the points where materials, food, energy are processed within the city. This format of production is absolutely local and capable of building new horizontal connections in the society if properly managed.

Gradually, imports and exports between cities will shift to the information, knowledge, design and code exchange format, and the rest of the resources will be as locally sourced as possible.

Olha Perekhrest, editor-in-chief at the Kufer journal

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Open the Workshop!

What Is Special about the Frankivsk Fab Lab?

The majority of visitors who come to the Promprylad factory immediately go upstairs, to the third floor, to the Renovation. However, if you open a closed door and walk down the gallery, you can find yourself in the Umbrella Workshop.

The Lab At the beginning of the renovated Promprylad’s functioning, this place hosted concerts and parties. But in the last few weeks before the City Scanning Session there’s dust in the air: preparations for the festival are underway, and a renovation is being completed. This will soon be the location of the first Frankivsk fab lab.

As a reminder, a fab lab is a "fabrication lab," a universal workshop with numerous tools. Or even a whole network of such workshops whose residents share blueprints, ideas and prototypes.

However, according to the project’s coordinator and urban researcher Dmytro Isayev, the fab lab in Frankivsk is not typical: "How does a classic fab lab start? There’s a group of people who come together, invest in equipment and announce: ‘We have a fab lab.’

In our case, it’s the other way around; Frankivsk already had a group of makers who produced various items. They were looking for a cheap place to rent and found it in the Umbrella Workshop. It just so happened that they all moved in there and met each other."

The future fab lab will have a metal processing workshop, a wood processing workshop, a textile workshop.

"They already know each other and work side by side. What do we do? We help them grow and bring additional services. For example, we can help them find funding to buy another machine. But the point of the group is not to be able to borrow equipment from each other. We want to create a whole ecosystem around our fab lab," says Dmytro about their plans.

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The Workshop The upgraded Umbrella Workshop is the main platform of the festival. It will host workshops and lectures for the participants of this year’s City Scanning Session.

To finish in time for the festival, volunteers have been involved in the workshop’s renovation. At this "building camp," you can not only help bring the fab lab project to life, but also try out working with various tools. Even before its official opening, the fab lab already performs its function as an open workshop where you can create and experiment.

"Although we plan to organize masterclasses or workshops here, this is not an event space, this is a space where you can cast concrete and break glass," explains Dmytro.

Concrete and glass already form the outlines of the future space. The old glass blocks will be preserved. The concrete walls and floor will soon be hidden behind manufacturing equipment. And instead of makers, the space will be tested out by urban researchers and festival visitors.

"To make a ‘classic’ fab lab, you need a lot of money. But we’re not sure if Frankivsk needs such a fab lab, with managers and 3D printers.

So we decided to start with this transitional format. During the festival, we will have a chance to figure out how many people are prepared for this, how interested they are in manufacturing. And if we realize that we don’t need this many production facilities, we can reduce them," says the architect.

Even under renovation, the future workshop already attracts people. It’s a good sign: even if the fab lab idea doesn’t work out, the makers will still have a renovated place and new friends who already know how to get there.

"The festival will leave behind something that can be used. Maybe it will launch the whole production ecosystem and bring it to a new level," deliberates Dmytro.

A Place of Power The workshop is the center of this ecosystem. After the renovation, it is supposed to turn into a kind of co-working space for makers: instead of sitting separately, each in their own garage, they will have a shared space to work. The idea of Frankivsk urbanists for making the manufacturers "go public" is based on the assumption that the more city residents know about them, the more the makers will earn, and the better it is for the city.

"It is beneficial for a city to have such a location where students and makers can come.

People should know that this is a place of power. It’s a place that brings together people with shared interests," says Dmytro.

Increasing the circulation of people in the workshop is in the interests of not only the fab lab creators, but the makers themselves, too.

In the end, they will have to make their own living: look for grants to cover the workshop’s expenses, organize training, recruit apprentices, make deals with the city administration to produce something for the city.

Dmytro Isayev emphasizes that the fab lab will welcome everyone who wants to come and make something. Yes, it will not be free. But he promises that it will be affordable for anyone, from students to experienced professionals.

"We simply connect different groups of people. We’ve come up with a way to do it: find proper equipment, create a proper space, and organize a festival in it, so people could hear about the project. We just take what we have and create a space which we invite everyone to visit," says Dmytro.

In the end, this is what festivals are for — to unite people for the sake of something bigger.

It’s just that in the case of a fab lab, "something bigger" is not rock music, but equipment and love for manual labor.

city development laboratory.It is a community united by interest in urban living, desire to learn and improve the urban environment, as well as a platform for communication, urban research and events. MetaLab is a project within the urban direction of the Teple Misto platform in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, and is located at the premises of Promprylad Plant, that is currently being redeveloped as a mixed use space for community, creative industries, and culture.

The targeted audience of MetaLab is both professional communities and those who have experience in the implementation of urban projects, seek for like-minded people, and implement their ideas in Ivano-Frankivsk, as well as those who want to learn more about the city living and environment, and are interested in the actual urban processes in the world.

METALAB SUPPORTS A socially equal, spatially comfortable, culturally rich, environmentally responsible, economically balanced city.

In order to reach these goals, MetaLab aims to create a supportive environment, a field for experiments, where the social and spatial potential of the city can be developed and tested in practice.

CONTACTS www.metalab.space metalab.if@gmail.com

Ivano-Frankivsk, 2019

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