Media Architecture Institute

In New York City there are more than five hundreds acres of publicly owned vacant land that are not being used and remain closed behind fences and chains. This land is concentrated in neighborhoods that are in need for beneficial land uses such as community gardens. 596 Acres is a project that facilitates access to New York city’s publicly owned land through the use of open source tools and hands-on mentorships. In this way, 596 acres help the communities to access unused lots, transform them temporarily, and so, improve the quality of life in the area where they live in.

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Every year in Denmark about 400.000 bicycles are discarded. Niels Bonefeld and Henrik Mortensen identified a chance in this problem and decided to take action. They figured out how to collect, repair and reuse some of the Denmark’s scrapped bicycles and send them to Sierra Leone and Mozambique. They created a schema that links a bicycle rental shop in Copenhagen with micro-loans in Sierra Leone and Mozambique. In this way, Baisikeli avoids the waste of resources and contributes to the development of different countries. (more…)

Change by Us is an online application that allows the citizens to submit ideas and collaborate on projects to improve their own city. With an opening screen similar to a sticky note board, the internet site encourages the publication of new ideas as well as the organization and participation in projects to realize such ideas. The project was initially created for the city of New York, but is has been also implemented in Philadelphia and Phoenix. As the code has been released under a AGPL license it emerges as a promising model for other cities and citizens interested to take action.

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