Clear Village
CLEAR Village is a collaborative design initiative working to:
+ Bring together leading figures from a variety of disciplines to co-draft an adaptive masterplan strategy for sustainable villages.
+ Find a host community to implement a masterplan and build a vibrant place beneficial to the local economy and region.
+ Analyse, gather and share further knowledge to be a catalyst for other neighbourhoods to emerge.
Point of Departure
+ The vast majority of sustainable villages and neighbourhoods today tend to be isolated or personality-driven and hardly define a vision that the greater number will embrace.
+ Few of the ambitious real estate projects that have tried to solve the equation of intensive urbanisation and environmental concern have been community-centred.
+ Most often, the notion of proper scale for holistic and systemic solution development has not been the starting point.
+ Rural, peri-urban and other economically marginalised areas struggle to find their path into the twenty-first century.
+ Retrofitting of existing locations with partial new builds is repeatedly overlooked;
+ Collaborative tools and information technology for complex planning are underutilised.
CLEAR Village wants to fill some of these gaps and take a fresh look at a possible urban renaissance.
Why a village?
The CLEAR Village Foundation believes that the village scale is optimal for tackling issues of sustainability systemically, developing innovation clusters to achieve lasting solutions faster. The village would be a tangible environment in which to experience the future of living, a community of sustainable wealth created through open collaboration, collective intelligence and inspired design.
Goals of the CLEAR Village Foundation
1. Develop and share complete solutions by bringing together leading figures from a variety of disciplines, through a process in a tangible location.
2. Co-design a replicable masterplan strategy with global experts to reboot rural & peri-urban areas.
3. Construct a real-life CLEAR Village, as well as offering new benchmarks and advising communities on how they can achieve best-practice.
4. Combine low-tech romantic ideals with 21st century high-tech solutions and offer alternative paths to non-sensical new builds.
5. Develop an aspirational future for living in the midst of financial and ecological crisis.
Process
The project will be unveiled at the CLEAR Village Launch on Tuesday, 1 September 2009, during the Copenhagen Design Week at DAC,the Danish Architecture Centre.
The CLEAR Village Labs are immersive, collaborative design events and the CLEAR Village Foundation’s first step towards co-creating a groundbreaking sustainable village. A ‘dream team’ of up to 100 professionals from complementary industries will be assembled in a collective intelligence group, working together to produce a replicable blueprint for a village.
Successive CLEAR Village Labs will produce and execute a masterplan to realise the first CLEAR Village. We have planned the Labs to run for five consecutive years, where the work will transform the intangible issues of a village into tangible strategies, moving towards building phase 1 of the village.
The CLEAR Village Lab will be held at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia in Barcelona on the 5-7 November 2009.
The | CLEAR Village NING Community is inviting contributors.