Reflection Archives - Osmos2022

About the tool

References:

Stickdorn, M., & Schneider, J. (2011). This is service design thinking. John Wiley & Sons;
Stickdorn M. Hormess M. Lawrence A. & Schneider J. (2018). This is service design doing : applying service design thinking in the real world : a practitioner’s handbook (First). O’Reilly Media.

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Engaging communities in times of Corona

avhill — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 16:30:06 +0000

/// Reflection

Reflection

Revisit to some tumultuous and insightful times.

It has started to feel like a surrealist nightmare, a distant memory, yet it is a mere two years ago, when we were still in the midst of pandemic and busy reorganising our already re-organised work. It is in this shift to the online world that we, in partnership with Circularium, had set up the “Engaging Communities in Times of Corona” online event.

Looking back at it today -as the frustrations have ebbed away- we are diving back into the positives it brought. In an unseen collective resilience, we and many many other public, private and community organisations, had adapted to new ways of engaging communities. And sometimes find ways to maintain the essential face to face: a “sacré” challenge!

It is useful to reflect how engagement and exchanges have evolved three years on. We see that there have been some considerable efficiencies that have emerged – such as the use of new platforms for collaboration (such as online whiteboards or dynamic polling platforms). Better communication seems also to have emerged since, particularly between public authorities, businesses and communities – which may have been the consequence of a pandemic of miss-information. We have learnt to select when to work apart or together. In retrospect intense moments of focus can be very helpful but some of the spark and spontaneous energy to collaborate has waned. Even if events and meetings are planned, non-physical communication remains important for humans and we see this to be difficult to replace.

Reflection

Year: 2023

Location: Brussels

Team: Hanne Van Reusel, Toha De Brant

Sector: Public space & community

Services: Vision

The presentations and reflections provide a rather unique and honest insight in practices of community engagement in full turmoil. And, as one of the advantages of online engagement, those precious insights have been recorded and are available.

Offline strategies for community engagement in times of Corona

A physical space for youth by youth to express and take action.

Destin Citoyen /// Céline Bortels

Recup Art: bringing beauty and food into less advantaged homes.

Cultureghem /// Anne Watthee

Citizens coming together to rebuild local communities

Citizen Spring /// Xavier Damman & Leen Schelfthout

Online strategies for community engagement in times of Corona

9 lessons learned.

Endeavour /// Tim Devos

Participatory budget Ixelles: Proximity Belgium.

Municipality of Ixelles, Brussels /// Maud Signy

Double impact by Zuur campagne.

Growfunding /// Frederik Lamote

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Saving the Stadstuin

avhill — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 16:28:40 +0000

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Reflection

How to build an economically liable future for an urban food haven?

MijnStadstuin in Amsterdam is a significant urban food haven. The place offers space for ever-popular allotment gardens, as well as a small food forest and hop production for a local brewery. Combining community engagement with entrepreneurial activities, MijnStadstuin has become an ecological innovation lab for urban food production. Yet, in December 2022 the organisation was declared bankrupt. Leaving engaged Amsterdammers and entrepreneurs in fear of losing their precious urban nature anchor.

Urban commons such as MijnStadstuin are confronted with the tricky challenge to run and manage a community-based initiative within the neoliberal system it aims to question. At the tipping point of “break it or make it” some of our experts are supporting the MijnStadstuin community in its transition towards an economically sound organisation.

Four hectares of DIY food production in Amsterdam is not something you want to let slip away. Nienke Schachtschabel, engaged volunteer (and future board member) at the food forest hosted by MijnStadstuin, manages to express the shared love for this place: “Why am I so invested in this project? Because I love this place, I love these people!”

Reflection

Year: 2022

Location: Brussels

Team: Nienke Schachtschabel, Marco Kooistra

Sector: Ecosystems, Public space & community

Services: Process Management, Sharing Knowledge

With passion Nienke stresses the importance of finding a place that offers such a strong and direct connection to nature. And to each other. In addition, this place provides a unique opportunity to foster and maintain such a place in the long term. “These kinds of urban food production activities often can only stay temporarily and get eventually suppressed by more profitable activities. With MijnStadstuin we had a long-term lease from the municipality, one that could be prolonged and which could eventually lead to a buyout. We want to make sure this ecological and community-oriented -and afterall also still a business- place can stay.”

How come then, that this beautiful place got at risk? Something somewhere in the passing on from the founding management to the follow up governance got skewed. Despite the fact the last managers were professionally engaged the finances grew negative. “To me, the biggest mismatch was the feeling we, as community members and engaged entrepreneurs, had that the people in charge didn’t share our connection to nature and with each other,” thus Nienke. “We are looking into what went wrong, yet we mainly want to invest energy in the question on how to continue from here. We go for it, we look ahead!”

So -like many urban commons initiatives- also the former MijnStadstuin is looking into the question on how to set up a healthy, efficient and financially liable organisation structure that also respects the community aspect and which breathes the love for nature that binds the community together. Three main directions have been taken to revive MijnStadstuin.

First, a return to the roots. One of the driving founding members, Robin Van Asperen, has re-joined the community, helping to reset the vision and stepping in into a joint process to engrain the DNA of the project in the organisation.

Second, a new cooperative structure is being set in place. “We are moving in the direction of a more horizontal, yet still very clearly structured, governance model. In the cooperative every partner gets an equal share.” Rather than a pyramid with MijnStadstuin at the top, this organisation will now be placed at level next to -instead of above- those of the other part-taking non-for-profits and entrepreneurs. (Did someone say self-organisation?)

Third, a solid business plan is at stake. One that takes into account the diversity of actors involved, the real financial risks and that leaves space to invest in community and nature -after all the essence of MijnStadstuin. We don’t think it is a coincidence that they have asked Marco Kooistra, our financial expert, to advise them in this complex business transition.

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Local wood as a commons

Hanne Van Reusel — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 16:25:46 +0000

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Reflection

Another take on the Sonian Wood Coop.

The commons are increasingly emerging, especially in relation to community engagement. As the next upcoming buzzword the ‘commons’ are appearing increasingly associated with urban resources, in relation to knowledge sharing, in building alternatives for extractive economies, as a model for a better society and also in the context of working with local wood.

We have also heavily invested in this concept / practice as a guide to help our world transition for the better. As part of the ‘Commons in Brussels’ lecture series our commons expert Hanne Van Reusel presented the Sonian Wood Coop project as an exemplar case of a commons-based approach.

In tandem with philosopher and commons expert Lieven De Cauter, Hanne introduced the practice of the commons. The full recording of these presentations is made accessible by Muntpunt.

The forest is a nice archetypical example from which one can tell the story of the commons. In pre-industrialised times, the commons was an everyday, or common, practice. Until the 17th century, nobody owned the forest, not a private or public entity. The forest belonged to nobody and everybody at once. It was a common, a shared resource. Local communities were able to benefit from the forest (fruits, firewood etc.). Those communities followed rules to avoid overexploitation to maintain the commons for future generations. The commons thus are made up by (1) a shared resource, (2) communities benefiting and taking care of this commons, and (3) a clear set of rules and governance that comes with this.

Reflection

Year: 2020

Location: Brussels

Team: Hanne Van Reusel

Sector: Ecosystems, Public space & community

Services: Process Management, Engagement

Enters the industrialisation period which goes hand in hand with urbanisation. Shared grounds and resources increasingly became private or publicly owned. And with capitalism came the understanding that if you leave resources without a clear -private or public- owner, they would fall victim to overexploitation. The tragedy of the commons became real.

Fast forward to our western societies today. Most of us live in urban environments, spaces in which the commons way of life has been suppressed or forgotten. Our direct environments are publicly or privately owned and managed. And yet today we still unselfishly volunteer to clean up our streets, to plant and green our livelihoods, to come out and fight for clean air. In times of crises we look back and increasingly recognise that organised communities have powerful ways to support sustainable transitions. The commons as a movement for community-based and sustainable change is born.

And so, looking at our forests today, we can see the peri-urban forest of Brussels (la Forêt de Soignes / Zoniënwoud) not only as a mainly publicly owned and managed forest, yet fundamentally as a common resource. There for us all to benefit from, there for us all to take care of it. The Sonian Wood today is -under its public management- openly accessible (for the biggest part) and provides recreation space, nature preservation and biodiversity, and -though not part of productive exploitation- is producing wood as a resource.

With the Sonian Wood Coop, we supported and professionalised a community-based desire to maintain this wood that is otherwise shipped around the globe as a local resource. To be used at its worth; being quality timber wood.

As the urbanisation process came with the loss of the commons, implementing commons-based approaches in the urban context comes with the necessary challenges. So also for the Sonian Wood Coop, the process required pioneering and prototyping of altering ways of working in our contemporary economic system. Throughout the process of setting up the Sonian Wood Coop, we worked hard on building a vision and narrative in line with our ambition to make this a community-based endeavour. For this we organised and engaged in several open discussions, bringing together woodworkers, foresters, public administrations, civil society concerned with urban ecology, lumberjacks, private and public owners, experts in circular economy, architects, students and every citizen who was willing to engage. From this self-organised group we build out a network around a shared vision and sustainable business model.

The self-organisation of the initiative took a next step through the set-up of a crowdfunding campaign (through Growfunding) that expanded and professionalised this self-organised group around the Sonian Wood Coop idea. With this community-based funding we got our first financial investment, yet -more importantly- we managed to expand our community which today is still at the core of the project.

On the financial-juridical side of the story, it required research and consultancy of experts to find the right business model and juridical structure to reflect the commons-based vision and values. Being situated within a system that is founded on the right of private ownership and financial growth we had to mediate between community involvement and the steel-hard efficiency that is necessary to set up a viable yet honest business today. For Sonian Wood Coop, this resulted in the establishment of a cooperative and the obtaining of funding from investors who heavily value sustainability and social welfare.

Even today, every step forward requires careful consideration of the core team to stay in line with the commons-oriented objectives, the involvement of the diverse connected communities and to run a healthy business.

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Empathy with the non-human: the personas of soil

Julia Rocha — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 10:58:52 +0000

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Reflection

Turning soil into persons through the tool of personas.

SoilMates is a 2-day event organised by Studio Swenden and Hummus & Hortense, focused on creating more awareness and appreciation for soil. In order to approach the topic of soil from a different perspective, we decided to create personas of different kinds of soil found in urban environments.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung considered the persona as “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual”. Within human-centred design personas have become an interesting tool to create these masks for target populations and describe the needs for each of them allowing us to design better solutions for them keeping their needs in mind. As the issues designers are confronted with have increasingly shifted more towards ecosystems which involve non-human actors, the idea of creating these masks for non-human actors has started to present itself. Additionally, the human brain often adds human characteristics to nonhuman objects, concepts or systems through anthropomorphisation (e.g. aggressive cars, brutal storms, lucky numbers, etc.).

Reflection

Year: 2021

Location: Brussels

Team: Adrian Hill, Laurens Van der Cruyssen

Sector: Public space & community

Services: Vision

So, when SoilMates approached us to help create more awareness of the importance of soil, we started playing around with applying the concept of the personas to non-human soil types. When discussing soil, one can easily get into rather complex stories of characteristics involving the pH-level, fertility, health, organic matter etc. very much like the complicated aggregate of human personalities. We decided to take four types of urban soil (i.e. polluted soil, common soil, reconstructed soil and displaced soil), portray them as human personalities with their own story, and link them through the narrative of a broken family system. In contrast to the traditional presentation of personas through posters, we opted for an installation with artefacts to allow for a more sensory activating experience of the personas.

After the presentation of the personas we asked the participants how soil can be improved in quality, and subsequently we asked them to apply these solutions to the different personas. The result was that participants became more aware of the different kinds of soil, its problems, but also their capabilities to improve soil themselves (e.g. looking for the right kind of soil and treatment, getting more informed, preventing soil from getting polluted).

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Stakeholder mapping with the Pentahelix

Julia Rocha — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 09:47:03 +0000

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Reflection

Observing the crowd before getting on stage.

Stakeholders mapping is one of the first things we do after kicking off a project. In 2015 we cobbled together a model referred to the Pentahelix, which we find remains incredibly useful. Little information was available when we started to use the model, which forced us to build a theory and practice around it. This article covers the genesis of this model, present some of the main concepts and cover how we use it.

Where does the Pentahelix come from?

The Pentahelix concept builds on two previous innovation focused models: the Triplehelix and the Quadrahelix. It is useful to understand how each model works as they all remain useful means to read stakeholders.

Tool

Sector: Ecosystems, public space & community, production

Services: Vision, process management, engagement, sharing knowledge

Triplehelix

The Triplehelix that can be traced back to post second World War technical innovation, noting the importance links between knowledge, industry and the public sector. This trilogy of actors are rather obvious and co-dependent. The public sector uses its tax base to finance knowledge institutions to develop fundamental research that is risky and poorly understood. Knowledge institutions (universities and research organisations) explore innovative technologies, materials and processes. The business sector commercialises them. To close the loop, the public sector reaps the rewards through taxes. Smart-phones would have remained a caricature on Star Trek and never revolutionised the communications industry had it not been for public research investment.

“The Triple Helix thesis is that the potential for innovation and economic development in a Knowledge Society lies in a more prominent role for the university and in the hybridisation of elements from university, industry and government to generate new institutional and social formats for the production, transfer and application of knowledge.” University of Stanford’s Triple Helix research group*.

In other words, knowledge requires firstly the public sector to support experimentation and R+D, taking an almost blind risk that businesses would never make. Likewise, it needs the public sector to develop the conditions or demands for innovation – particularly in terms of communications, transport and resources. The military is a good example of this, that were experimenting with technology appearing decades later in ones smart-phone (yes Steve Jobs owes his gratitude to the military). Once the conditions for experimentation and development are created, the natural remaining partner is business that can find a practical way to release the product to the market.

Quadruplehelix

The Triplehelix is rather generic however if the innovation cares about people, then users must belong to the stakeholder list. The problem with the Triplehelix is that the trilogy assumes they know best for the market. Not everyone wants to have the same plates, clothes or colour television. The late 70’s brought about a wave of the ‘individual collective’ that was hard for both retailers and politicians to account for. Evidently people (consumers) matter. This introduced an additional stream into the helix, the users, thus creating the Quadruplehelix.

The Quadruplehelix is no longer four isolated groups but rather ‘stakeholders’ each have a valuable contribution to be made within an R+D project. The Quadruplehelix brings these actors closer together and has brought the conversation down to the ground. However the fourth dimension, the users, appear to be treated as consumers/users for local business innovation and services rather than genuine partners for co-creation and to build on place based knowledge. It is also a model that is very appealing to the IT industry rather than place-based issues where money and entrepreneurship pose quite different interests.

The penta: from business to complexity

A final step to reach the ‘penta’ is the distinction of capital and business — both represent quite different stakeholders. Business stakeholders are often aggressive, competitive, take risks and are prepared to fail. Capital, including finance and ownership of resources, is much more risk averse and tends to involve small incremental change.

This has meant that the Pentahelix can go far beyond R+D, technology and science and enter into a spatial dimension involving innovative business models, social networks, wicked problems and so on. The Pentahelix is thus an ideal tool for working with complexity and economic models, rather than consumer/market driven business innovation models.

The Pentahelix model as it stands was inspired by a number of tools that we had seen, however when we began to test it there was little literature to reference. More recently environmental projects have embraced the ‘Quintuple Helix’, which we have found to be a useful theoretical concept but much harder to apply in practice (see the original source to the Quintuple Helix here).

Stakeholder interest + relations

Stakeholders that are driven by too many interests can disrupt a project by not being clear about their objectives. But it is impossible to say that you are only interested a few things: we have driving interests and supporting interests. This all is relevant to context. Stakeholders generally prioritise one interest over others. Professional knowledge, career, wealth and home are generally the the strongest interests motivating stakeholders. It is useful to establish what a stakeholders’ professional motivations are and if their personal interests will play a strong role.

A second issue involves stakeholder relations. It is quite normal that stakeholders bring personal or institutional friction that can stifle building positive relationship. Opportunity always creates the most effective bargaining chip — where stakeholders have a perceived sense of gaining, then personal issues can be overlooked and revised.

Stakeholders Vs Actors

Stakeholders generally refer to organisations that are connected to a problem or project out of interest or organisational motive. Stakeholders may not have an inherent interest in a project problem. Actors are those stakeholders that actively partake (with or against) the development of a project.

Projects generally involve coalitions and constellations of different stakeholders and interest groups. Even if there is a relatively good understanding of the stakeholders, the place, problem or timing may result in different levels of interest or engagement. Mapping out stakeholders is therefore an art in curating which actors should be taken into consideration. The Pentahelix is based on five stakeholder types:

Public sector: including administrations and elected officials.
Knowledge sector: most notably organisations focused on expert knowledge.
Businesses: providing business services through material and immaterial goods.
Civil society: the NGO or third sector that is accountable to a community (excluding private lobby groups).
Capital (and finance): which can involve land, finance and the ownership of technology and resources (but not the exploitation).

Actors can fit into more than one category, particularly if they are a large public authority. If this is the case, it is best to define which department is responsible according to the actor type.

As there is no formal way of knowing which are genuinely interested, it is useful to run a mapping exercise during an early project team meeting, where possible with a client or the main project partners.

Stakeholders Vs Actors

The Pentahelix is highly useful, yet imperfect. It is especially relevant at the beginning of a process, as a ‘quick and dirty’ analysis tool, when little is understood about the landscape or stakeholders. It is also very useful for bring the project team together in reflecting which stakeholders are likely to be be affect or further engaged. However, the map can be very synthetic and quickly becomes redundant once the team engages with the stakeholders. Stakeholders rarely fit cleanly into a particular segment. The Pentahelix is certainly useful throughout a project as a reminder of the stakeholders that exist and need to remain engaged.

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About the tool

University of Stanford’s Triple Helix research group
“Creating Local Innovation in a Quadruple Helix” – an EU funded project looking into local innovation.
“The Quintuple Helix innovation model: global warming as a challenge and driver for innovation”, Carayannis et al, in Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship volume 1, Article number: 2 (2012)

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The wood of the Sonian Forest

Julia Rocha — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 20:15:24 +0000

/// Case study

Reflection

Cities produce vast amounts of resources, much of which goes under used or overlooked.

Cities produce vast amounts of resources, much of which goes under used or overlooked. Good quality hardwood is a resource that many cities have, found in parks, forests and street-trees. Yet wood in most European cities is treat as waste or a liability. The Sonian Wood Coop explored ways to localise a valuable resource, creating jobs and an appreciation for local wood.

The Sonian forest sits on the edge of the Region of Brussels and is considered one of the largest urban forests for a European city. It produces some 20,000m2 of wood per year which is cut and sold to the highest bidder. While this may seem logical, the wood is largely felled and sent directly to Asia (mostly to China) as uncut logs. No processing or transformation is done locally before it is exported. Conversely, furniture makers and builders located in and around the Sonian forest often purchase wood from Scandinavia, Canada or even Asia as local wood is hard to come by. We saw this absurd contradiction as an opportunity to research and then shift local value chains through entrepreneurship.

Case study

Project: Sonian Wood Coop

Client: Self initiated

Year: 2020

Partners: Centre d’ecologie urbain Bruxelles, The Walden Project

Location: Brussels, Flemish and Wallonian Brabant

Team: Adrian Hill, Hanne Van Reusel, Stephan Kampelmann, Marco Kooistra

Sector: Production, vision, process management

Services: Business model & financing, systemic & service design, governance models, facilitation of events and meetings, user research & engagement

What goes around

Why does wood from Belgium end up being shipped across the world? There are a number of reasons and various speculations. China has little to no local wood and is prepared to pay premium prices for high quality material. Asia, as the world’s factory, often ships containers back that are empty, so transport costs are considered low. Finally, speculation is being made that there is a concerted industrial strategy to break local production chains in Europe so that they can be bought up by multi-nationals.

The sale of wood for export markets was common knowledge to both local institutions and researchers, yet little had been done about it. One reason is that local policy makers could not see how to interrupt a value chain that the market considered was working.

When we looked into how the wood value chain operated, we found that it involved a vast number of steps, through which it may be possible to access the wood. Firstly, the source of wood. Much of the wood was sourced from the three main forest owners: the regions of Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia. The regions auction wood in a complex system amongst a small group of merchants, once per year. Private landholders in the region also owned wood, but the volumes were far smaller.

Purchasing from auction also meant arranging a lumber-jack and other logistics, which considering the small Belgian market was challenging. A second source of wood is from the timber merchants, who have purchased the wood from the landholders. This meant that prices were far higher but risk was lower as it was clearer what was being purchased. A third source would be from the lumber yard, however the limited remaining yards in Belgium meant that prices were not competitive.

After establishing where the wood comes from, it was important to explore where it can go. We considered two main ‘clients’. Firstly carpenters and carpentry companies. Considering that Brussels has a higher income population, companies exist that work with quality hardwood and are prepared to pay for quality and the local branding. Secondly, retail customers were an opportunity for finished items that did not require intensive processing (such as tables). Finally, other markets were considered such as the construction sector and a market for flooring.

Breaking the cycle, establishing the Coop

In this self-funded project, Osmos developed everything required to launch the cooperative and make the resource attractive to the local market. We called the venture the Sonian Wood Coop, with the ambition to source local wood for the local market with the result of reducing carbon emissions, providing jobs and creating value from the local resource.

Establishing the coop involved researching existing production chains, understanding local interest groups, developing businesses partnerships, sourcing start-up capital (such as a successful crowdfunding campaign), defining the branding and website, campaigning the media, exploring processing, marketing and selling the wood. Osmos was involved in all steps of the process.

The Coop has now been in existence since 2020 and has grown to five full-time staff. This can be considered a successful case of re-localising local resources.

The coop now

By 2022, the coop had grown to some 6 employees, shifting hundreds of tonnes of wood back into the local market. The material is used by woodworkers, from amateurs to professionals, across the region and shows a healthy demand for local resources. The coop has diversified its offering to include raw wood, a range of processed products (such as tables and flooring) and customised design. While this remains a positive news story, the growth of the business remains challenging particularly in terms of dealing with cash flow, production volumes, finding a permanent location and dealing with the ebbs and flows of the international wood market. We look forward to rewriting this article in another three years!

The following video from Brussels’ Bruzz news site captures the atmosphere:

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More about the case study

Sonian Wood Coop website

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Five options for a community greenhouse

Julia Rocha — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 17:01:47 +0000

/// Case study

Reflection

Food may be a secondary benefit of community supported agriculture.

Food may be a secondary benefit of community supported agriculture. Culture, community building, local business based local resources and alternative workplaces offer benefits that can far outweigh the food production. This case study explored scenarios for a community oriented production space that was being developed by a local public authority.

The City of Brussels launched “Food for change”, a project to develop urban agriculture within its dense urban fabric. The aim is to focus on local, short supply chain production of food. For this, the closest possible market gardeners and suppliers were targeted. Within the framework of an urban renewal program (Contrat de Quartier Durable Bockstael) a potential production site, a greenhouse, had been identified but the exact function of this site and how it would be managed in the long-term was unclear.

This raised a series of questions about the very nature of food. Is food production in cities simply about substance? Or should urban agriculture also involve an element of community and culture? These questions could radically change the form and function of the greenhouse.

In a project commissioned by the City of Brussels, we coordinated a participative process to define what kinds of community based agricultural projects could be activated on the site, what kind of infrastructure would be needed and develop a business plan for the realisation of the project.

Case study

Project: Serre de Bockstael

Client: City of Brussels

Year: 2020

Location: Brussels

Team: Hanne Van Reusel. Stephan Kamplemann

Sector: Public space & community, production

Services: Vision

Interviews, focus groups and public exhibitions were the main modalities for feedback. Firstly, the project involved reaching out to local organisations actively involved in urban agriculture to identify how this site could support existing initiatives. Secondly, it involved looking at how neighbours and local inhabitants would react to scenarios of how the site could be used.

As the end-use remained unclear until the project was built, it was important not to over-promise any ideas to the neighbours and local residents. We therefore created a series of abstract sketches to define the general mood, without showing a resolved design. This meant that the design concepts could be presented to the community, yet they remained conceptual and local residents did not feel threatened. Four scenarios emerged:

A greenhouse for in-ground food production.
A community plant nursery.
A plant production space for temperate crops (above ground).
A food processing space.
A community café.

As an organisation was sought to activate the space, the scenarios also gave the community a chance to independently put forward proposals. Osmos developed a business plan for the planned greenhouse and provided input to adapt the outline of the plans according to the needs of its future users.

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Institutions as eco-systems

Julia Rocha — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 20:45:06 +0000

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Reflection

Five school campuses explore ways to reduce their environmental footprint.

Institutional infrastructure consumes vast amounts of resources and in turn produce considerable amounts of waste. In isolation, an individual school, hospital or aged-care facility is often limited in their capacity to reduce their environmental footprint. But by grouping institutions, it can be possible to look for ways to pool resource management and reduce the environmental impact of institutional sites. Five schools campuses in Brussels decided to look for a way to reduce their environmental impact, while also nurturing a grass-roots movement to share resources and knowledge between students and staff.

Brussels’ French language community, the COCOF, is responsible for nine schools, spread out across five campuses and hosting some 7000 elementary, high school and technical training students. The education curricula is extremely diverse, ranging from primary school to professional education such as baking and agriculture.

We were commissioned to research and design a visionary masterplan to outline a more sustainable direction for the COCOF’s campuses that involved teachers, students and ground staff. The concept of ‘ecological transition’ was recently integrated into the COCOF with a small transition team set up to facilitate workshops and events. This masterplan would help the team to take a wholistic view of a transition and allow them to prioritise actions.

Case study

Project: Mission Janus

Client: Commission communautaire française (COCOF)

Year: 2019

Partners: Centre d’Ecologie Urbain de Bruxelles

Location: Brussels

Team: Adrian Hill, Hanne Van Reusel

Sector: Production, vision, public space and community

Services: Systemic & service design, governance models, facilitation of events and meetings, user research & engagement, strategic communication

Learning the ropes

The project was driven by senior staff within the education campuses, including the general director, which helped to put the project high on the agenda. The first step involved extensive research to understand how the campuses operated according to three variables: teaching, maintenance and student culture.

What we found was that each campus site operated as an island, it had a very different education curriculum, approach to maintenance and student body. For example, one campus had no problems with having vending machines on site and didn’t separate waste, while another banned the sale of junk food and had a range of separated waste bins. We found a reluctance from the maintenance staff to go beyond their standard scope of work. We also found tensions existed between the teaching and maintenance staff, which we found came down to poor communication and a lack of shared vision. We also found that many of the teach staff were interested in including environment into their curriculum but didn’t quite know where to start.

Schools as an eco-system

The five campuses were very different in form and function. All shared some key features, such as having a school canteen and having specific waste flows, such as organic waste. Some schools were located in the city centre and had very limited space while other campus sites had abundant space and were located on the periphery of the city. This allowed us to look at ways the schools could share both resources and adapt the education programme. For example, one campus contained a vast food production garden while another had a cooking school. These links were obvious but the bigger questions was about coordinating when there was a supply or demand of one resource or another and what facilities could be integrated into teaching.

From ideas to action

Within a process of nine months, we set up concrete actions, leveraged existing initiatives and proposed a scenario for the ecological and social transition on the middle and long term. There was great ambition, which could have been considered overwhelming. The project resulted in setting concrete goals to help the staff focus and prioritise.

As a closing reflection, the masterplan would have been easily overlooked if it were not for two key variables. The school benefited from having an aligned senior management team, which was overseen by the general director and helped to drive the overall strategic vision. Furthermore, the transition team meant that operational work could be carried out once the masterplan process was completed.

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