GRÜNtopia

Grow Your Green City is an international campaign creating awareness of the fundamental role played by urban green. Grow Your Green City is committed to the idea that a Smart City should be a climate-conscious city, exploring how digital and media technologies can contribute to address urban climate adaptation and water-conscious urban development, strengthening and promoting sustainability cultures.

Workshop Grow Your Green City @ Floriade Expo 2022, Almere, The Netherlands, 25 February 2021

Article “Creative Crossovers: Negotiating Past and Future” in the University of Southern California Public Diplomacy Magazine issue summer 2019.Monuments stand as a tangible testimony to what is untouchable: memory and history in their collective dimension.As vehicles of meaning, monuments are ambassadors affecting the public negotiation of narratives

Article Creative Crossovers @ Public Diplomacy Magazine, University of Southern California, USC Annenberg, USC Centre on Public Diplomacy, USC Masters of Public Diplomacy Program, USA, 7 June 2019

The “Future Narratives and Immersive Experiences” symposium addresses the challenges posed by these developments by bringing together interdisciplinary co-creators in the audiovisual sector, companies with a background in media, VR/AR/MR, games, 3D sound, in the staging of productions, in communication and advertising as well as cultural and heritage institutions and players from other fields with the urge of delivering high-quality storytelling in the digital era.

Lectures, Pitches & Dinner Future Narratives and Immersive Experiences Symposium @ Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Potsdam, Germany, 22 May 2019

We are experiencing a structural change in the function of diplomats due to the changing role of the nation state in our globalized and increasingly digital and networked world.
Future Diplomacy Lab creates an inspirational space to speculate on possible diplomacy applications by projecting onto diplomacy innovative digital solutions from numerous fields.

Lectures & Workshop Future Diplomacy Lab @ Diplomacy Camp, Embassy Kingdom of the Netherlands, Brussels, 7 February 2019

Water is the necessary resource for life. Human settlements have always been dependent upon access to clean water and its relative scarcity – freshwater makes up only 2.5% of water available on the earth – has awarded it the name ‘blue gold’. If world population increases as expected, hitting the 9 billions threshold by 2050, will water resources be sufficient?

Embassy Lab Water Conscious Fashion, @ Neonyt, Kraftwerk Berlin, 16 January 2019

Fast-paced advances in technology are creating diffuse and volatile conditions in which international actors operate. Disruptive innovations such as machine learning and big data analytics are changing governments, NGOs, the media, businesses, and in some cases entire industries. New and unexpected players entering the field are putting pressure on the traditional division of roles between politics, business, journalism and civil society.

Lectures & Workshops Digital Diplomacy @ The Hague Digital Diplomacy Camp 2018 Un-Conference, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, The Hague, 2 February 2018

Hybrid Diplomacy designates the combining of traditional diplomacy and innovative diplomacy. Hybrid Diplomacy includes the collaboration between state and non-state actors in a network diplomacy that involves next to traditional diplomats and governments, also civil society and NGOs, businesses, international organizations, and other players. Hybrid Diplomacy addresses also the multiple hybridizations in the diplomatic field, including diplomatic practices that combine communication in physical space and social media, that deal with crossover issues, and that mediate in the interaction fields of different cultures.

Lectures, Workshop & Discussions Are You A Hybrid Diplomat ? @ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Directorate-General for European Cooperation (DGES) & Innovation Team DARE, The Haag, The Netherlands, 18 January 2018

Sharing Economy is one of the phenomena of a world rapidly changing. This reshaping of the world is happening faster than the reshaping of the societies and their institutions.

Talks, Lectures, Discussions & Workshop Embassy Lab shareCONOMY @ Embassy Kingdom of the Netherlands, Berlin, 7 July 2017

International interdisciplinary lab researches the potential of curating as co-creating with the public as well as the transformations of the role of the expert curator.

Lectures, Discussions & Workshops Embassy Lab Co-Creating the City @ Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Berlin, 14 October 2016
Ikarian-Cretan Dinner @ Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin, 18.00-23.00, 14 October 2016

Embassy Lab Future Diplomacy brings together experts from the Harvard J. F. Kennedy School of Government, the Académie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris, Global Diplomacy Lab, the German Federal Office, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, international diplomats, creative professionals, and other experts.
Digital tools enable and support participative practices and networks, trespassing all borders. In our globalized world, a whole range of transnational webs perform independently and often with no connection to the traditional channels of diplomacy.

Lectures, Discussions & Workshops Embassy Lab Future Diplomacy @ Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Berlin, 7 October 2016

Highly innovative, creative and pragmatic Dutch approach to develop technology solutions for global challenges at the Hannover Messe 2014.
The Netherlands, this year’s partner country of Hannover Messe, will present the Holland Smart City House as part of the Metropolitan Solutions trade fair from Monday 07 April to Friday 12 April 2014.

Television Program: Interviews, Lectures, Talks & Discussions @ Hannover Messe, Hannover, Germany, 7-10 April 2014
Urban Screening Smart & the City @ Hannover Opera, Hannover, Germany, 7-10 April 2014

Circular Economy encompasses technical as well as biological cycles and has as a goal to keep materials and products at their highest utility and value during the whole up-cycling process.

Research Embassy Lab Circular Economy @ Kingdom of The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Hague, 18 March 2016

Embassy Lab Hybrid Health focuses on innovative health solutions that combine the physical and the digital and on health applications and services embedded in our daily living environment.
Kingdom of The Netherlands Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport, Edith Schippers is opening Embassy Lab Hybrid Health.

Lectures, Pitches & Workshop, Opening Edith Schippers, Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport, Kingdom of The Netherlands @ Medica, Dusseldorf, Germany, 17 November 2015

Embassy Lab Velo focuses on sustainable and innovative cycling traffic resources and knowledge exchange between the City of Amsterdam and the City of Berlin.

Bicycle Tour, Lectures & Discussions Embassy Lab Velo @ Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Berlin, 29 March 2015

CRISISdesign innovates in and for situations of change and crisis for communities that need new infrastructures for daily life.

Lectures & Discussions Embassy Lab CRISIS design @ Metropolitan Solutions, CityCube, Berlin, 22 May 2015

The complexity of urban systems demands the involvement of different stakeholders at a very early stage, in order to identify the challenges and define objectives.

Public Lecture Program Embassy Lab Smart City Governance @ Metropolitan Solutions, CityCube, Berlin, 21 May 2015

Mobility+ investigates the synergies between Smart Mobility and the different systems of Smart City and addresses mobility in all of its dimensions, incorporating topics such as Urban Service Design, Smart Tourism, Smart Retail, Healthy & Smart Cities, and Clean Tech.

Public Lecture & Workshop Program Embassy Lab Mobility+ @ BMW Welt, Munich, 25 February 2015

Embassy Lab Co-Operative is a one-day program for the Berlin visit of the Dutch Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Ronald Plasterk, February 23rd 2015.
Next to his meeting with the German Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Barbara Hendricks, Minister Ronald Plasterk visited Berlin urban initiatives, cooperatives and participation movements to discuss them the potential of urban co creation.

Discussions & Visits Embassy Lab Co-Operative @ Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Berlin, 23 February 2015

Embassy Lab is innovation program and a prototype for experimenting with future functions of embassies in the current age of EUization, globalization and digitalization.
Embassy Lab at the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Berlin brings together the official traditional institution of the “Embassy” with the innovative potential of a creative “Lab”.
Embassy Lab is a think tank and innovation hub, for research and discussion, for experimenting with new models, and for presenting and communicating ideas.

Research, Workshops, Lectures & Symposiums Embassy Lab @ Embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands in Berlin & Kingdom of The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Hague, 2014~2021

Happy Health explores the impact of Smart Cities and related concepts and technologies on wellbeing and the prevention of illness.
Happy Health functions as a platform for exchange between innovative projects from the Netherlands and relevant German institutions and actors.
Happy Health focuses on health, the urban environment and lifestyle bringing together designers, experts and stakeholders to investigate current challenges and develop new scenarios and concepts.

Workshop & Public Lecture Program Embassy Lab HAPPY health @ DMY 2014, Tempelhof Airport, Berlin, 29 May 2014

Ecological transition implies and demands a conceptual mutation, a paradigm shift.
This global transistion has to integrate also other systems of knowledge and ways of conceiving the world, some of which are still organizing the daily lives of the inhabitants of cities in the Global South, and are often shunned and disregarded in the Global North.

Labs & Fests @ Glocal, 2023~2026

The notion of a circular city has taken to occupy center stage as a main concept for sustainable zero-waste urban futures. And yet, as one takes a closer look, the circle expands in multiple ripples and loops, revealing the sheer complexity that envisioning – let alone developing – circular cities entail.

Presentation & Workshop Cities in the Loop: Re-coding the Circular City @ Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin, 1 July 2022
Presentation & Workshop zirkularKIEZ @ Bits & Bäume 2022 Conference for Digitization and Sustainability, Technical University Berlin, 2 October 2022

ReWild Autobahn proposes a hybrid (natural and artificial) landscape on a dismantled urban highway in Berlin as a green corridor for humans and non-humans.

Exhibition ReWild Autobahn @ BDA Gallery, Association of German Architects Berlin, Berlin, 6 October – 26 November 2021
Publication Berlin Atlas @ BauNetz, Berlin, 19 November 2021

Grow Your Green City is an international campaign creating awareness of the fundamental role played by urban green. Grow Your Green City is committed to the idea that a Smart City should be a climate-conscious city, exploring how digital and media technologies can contribute to address urban climate adaptation and water-conscious urban development, strengthening and promoting sustainability cultures.

Workshop Grow Your Green City @ Floriade Expo 2022, Almere, The Netherlands, 25 February 2021

In the Anthropocene, the juxtaposition between nature versus artifact and designed environment is becoming obsolete. In the dissolution of this polarity lays a great chance: architecture (which in the allegorical depiction of the Vitruvian Primitive Hut by Marc-Antoine Laugier and Charles Eisen of 1753 had emerged from nature) merges with nature once again.

Architecture G AI A @ de Waag Technology & Society, Amsterdam, 2019-2020

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of digital instruments is rapidly increasing.
As the possible consequences of digitization are more sharply outlined, this opens new possibilities for spatial organization.
This urges us to reconsider the guiding principles and models for the urbanization of technology we want to follow and what our city visions are.
We can still choose.

Publication Post COVID-19 City @ KHM #0 Magazine, Academy of Media Arts (KHM), Cologne, Germany, 1 July 2022

What is the relationship between city visions and urban concepts from the past and today’s Smart City narratives?

Lectures & Discussion Visions, Concepts and Narratives for the Networked City @ Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, 20 February 2020

Climate City explores how digital technologies contribute to addressing climate adaptation and develops digitalization strategies that take urban sustainability into account. Climate City focuses on digitally supported participatory climate adaptation and is committed to the idea that a smart city should be a climate-conscious city.

Lectures & Discussions Climate City @ Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, 20 November 2019

Digitalization transforms our cities, with far-reaching efforts towards technology-powered increased efficiency, sustainability and at times participation. This raises new questions on privacy, data governance and (digital) design, historically unaddressed by city planning, architecture, civil society and governance. With cities worldwide striving to earn a “Smart City” reputation, it is however disputed who exactly benefits from these concepts.

Lectures & Discussion City Making in the Digital Age @ Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, 21 February 2019

City Making Lab is a series of programs focusing on digitalization and the city. City Making Lab is a co-operation between Hybrid Space Lab and Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). City Making Lab investigates ongoing developments at the intersection of cities and digital technology, engaging with urban mobility and public space, new patterns of space utilization for living and working, circular city, climate adaptation and healthy cities.

Research, Lectures & Workshops City Making Lab @ Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, 2019~2020

Water is the necessary resource for life. Human settlements have always been dependent upon access to clean water and its relative scarcity – freshwater makes up only 2.5% of water available on the earth – has awarded it the name ‘blue gold’. If world population increases as expected, hitting the 9 billions threshold by 2050, will water resources be sufficient?

Embassy Lab Water Conscious Fashion, @ Neonyt, Kraftwerk Berlin, 16 January 2019

Recent developments such as Internet of Things, Big Data, and Machine Intelligence have ambition and the potential to algorithmically manage life, including urban nature. These developments in technology and media are supporting the development of a new hybrid architecture where Architecture and Nature fuse: NatureTecture!

Article NatureTecture © Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin, 20 March 2018

Sharing Economy is one of the phenomena of a world rapidly changing. This reshaping of the world is happening faster than the reshaping of the societies and their institutions.

Talks, Lectures, Discussions & Workshop Embassy Lab shareCONOMY @ Embassy Kingdom of the Netherlands, Berlin, 7 July 2017

International interdisciplinary lab researches the potential of curating as co-creating with the public as well as the transformations of the role of the expert curator.

Lectures, Discussions & Workshops Embassy Lab Co-Creating the City @ Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Berlin, 14 October 2016
Ikarian-Cretan Dinner @ Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin, 18.00-23.00, 14 October 2016

Poly Garden City is a participative project integrating green into Athens built environment, fusing building and gardens into new hybrid urban typologies, and reinterpreting modernist urban heritage and a strategy for participative climate adaptation for cities in semi-arid climates.

Research & Urban Design @ City of Athens, 5 April 2015

Embassy Lab Co-Operative is a one-day program for the Berlin visit of the Dutch Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Ronald Plasterk, February 23rd 2015.
Next to his meeting with the German Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Barbara Hendricks, Minister Ronald Plasterk visited Berlin urban initiatives, cooperatives and participation movements to discuss them the potential of urban co creation.

Discussions & Visits Embassy Lab Co-Operative @ Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Berlin, 23 February 2015

From Smart City to Smart Citizen: mapping the Smart City, empowering the Smart Citizen.
Smart City is the fusion of the Urban and the Digital Age.
Ubiquitous digitalisation together with the increasing complexity of global challenges demand for interdisciplinary co-designing processes, involving society at large.

Urban Research Smart & the City @ Embassy Kingdom of the Netherlands Berlin, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Kingdom of the Netherlands, The Hague, 2 February 2014

Infodrome is a think tank for the Dutch government in the information society. The objectives of Infodrome are gaining insight into the social consequences of the information revolution , organizing and feeding the public debate about the role of government in this, and advising the government on relevant strategic choices.

Research & Publications @ Infodrome, Thinktank of the Dutch Government, Den Haag, 1 March 2000