Eureka Urban Innovators Training is officially over now! We spent a wonderful and very eventful week in Bilbao wrapping up a year of our experimental training for future urban innovators.
For 12 months our students, with often different profiles and backgrounds, have worked together simultaneously in four cities: Bilbao, Amsterdam, Timisoara and Venice on four different urban challenges. More about those projects here .
Students got a difficult task to find solutions that were not only innovative but would engage local communities and challenge the traditional top-down approach. In the end, they came up with four exciting projects that captured all of us.
The Romanian Cluster made an interactive treasure hunt and a short film telling the story of the Flavia market area in an engaging way allowing people to rediscover its potential and hidden gems;
The Spanish Cluster has captured untold stories of the Zorrotzaurre island and made them available through small placed and QR codes that they put around the island;
The Italian Cluster made a board game that tells the history of the Guidecca island in Venice and allows inhabitants to rediscover the space where they live in;
Last but not least, our Dutch Cluster made an interactive map of the Bajes district in Amsterdam that will allow new inhabitants of the area to reconnect with its past. They presented the stories in a short play that we all got to enjoy so much!
All these simple and yet very effective solutions allowed our students to test their ideas, use creativity where resources were scarce and learn more about how urban innovation can be done. As many of us said in those days: maybe we should be going DEEP instead of BIG!
We are very proud of all our students and most importantly of them becoming such a tight community that is passionate and willing to do more in their areas but also as a community! Let’s see what they come up with next!
