The Urban Development Kit provides tools to ameliorate the atmosphere in contemporary cities. The Urban Development Kit is a collection of tools. Over the time the website aims to become a resource of ideas, concepts and tools for a citizen-driven urban design.
One of our kits supports watchful citizens and plants to compete with pavement, concrete and asphalt. It helps plants to interact with modern cities, to prevail against soil sealing. A website and an interactive map enables the people to collect photos of “asphalt flowers” in Helsinki and other cities and to monitor the progress of the “cultivation”. With respect to urban environmental research, the urban development kit is a statement about the importance to counteract the sealing of the surfaces in the city. Accordingly, in the exhibition can be seen design for urban surfaces which are based on the geometry the plants themselves.
The work has been developed for the Art&HENVI project, organized by the finish Bioart Society.
In 2014, a new version of the urban development kit was presented at a creative cloud workshop, organized from ars electronica (see the fotos from the workshop)
Plese look at the presentation of the workshop