In these days I’ve tryed to put me in the shoes of Hamar inhabitants. I have read all the workshop kit booklet, I stare at the pictures of the square before and after the construction site, I’ve read about Hamar temperatures, lights, history and origins. I’ve found Hamar culture center project amazing with all those spaces open to citizen, it will give a lot of meeting opportunities to create an increasing community.
But what makes me really understand this project is Learing from Hamar Noa’s post. I have understood what a big importance this participative process has in creating that community more than planning a square. As she wrote: “To build a square we need to build a community first. A community is the foundation of a square.”
She continues saying that Hamariens are looking at themselves (and the foreign people who are there to facilitate the process) and defining themselves; working on Stortorget square project, they are also creating a community.
I had this feeling coming out of the cinema after Life in day screening, a crowdsourced documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010 (from wikipedia). Life in day could be seen as an attempt that we, as human beeings, make to portrait ourself: in doing so we are understanding all the similarities that life has in different countries. This makes me feel part of a community, humanity.
Back to our project I think that one way to continue in this community-creation direction is to take into account the possibility of realizing a lot of different Hamarien’s proposals for Stortorget square: this could be done with a scheduled calendar of events or square arrangements. In this way the square could be alive and in continuos changement, it can open to dialogue and be the first open-ended square.
Another way could be to overlap different projects contemporaneously, under a main direction as Kevin Macdonald did with Life in day.
13.10.2011
