UrbExplorers Conference: It’s a Wrap
Our final conference invited urban explorers from all over Europe to exchange experiences, ideas, and tools. The inspirational presentations and sessions addressed ways to use this practice for many important goals - education, community building, urban planning, and integration of young people. It also created an opportunity for the speakers and guests to become part of our UrbEX Network following up on the project after its end. The event took place in Refugio - a special place in the heart of Berlin.
Urban Exploration in Various Practices
The speakers who joined the conference presented various approaches to urban exploration, mapping and storytelling. In many of the tools and methodologies, storytelling took a central role. The researchers shared that in their experience when people learn about the background story, the whole experience becomes much more engaging and relatable. Using urban exploration methodologies also proves to be a strong mechanism for connecting very different groups of people - students with teachers, and community members with municipality officials. It was also exciting to discover many tools that were designed in the form of a game - virtual experiences, card and board games and more. If you are curious about the topics and presenters, visit our conference page for more details. Our hosts Tesserae also presented our first output of this project - the Urban Exploration Handbook.
After the presentations, we dedicated time for the audience to ask questions. As a result, we had the opportunity to elaborate more on the projects that were presented and the highlights from the discussions were graphically recorded live. See them below:
The live visual recordings were done by Nomadways’ Alexandra Nikolova (Ål Nik) and Ilaria Fresa.
Interactive Sessions
We had the chance to present our latest output: our Urban Exploration Toolkit - ItinerAnts. During an interactive session, facilitated by Zemos98, the participants had the chance to try out the tool and explore the local neighbourhood in Berlin.
All of our Local Labs that happened in the five local environments of the UrbEX partners during the last year, were also presented to the audience. The visitors had the chance to discover each one of them by visiting dedicated spaces and by being welcomed by the members of our partner teams - Bond of Union, Tesserae, Zemos98, Nomadways and 4change.
There was also space and time for the visitors to form smaller groups and discuss questions and topics that were interesting to them - at the Cocreation Open Space session, facilitated by Nomadways. Some groups formed around burning questions and challenges that became evident during the presentations and conversations. Others were interested in discussing particular challenges that they have in their own work.
Networking & Follow-up
Finally, we closed the conference with conversations about the future. During our final session, we officially launched our UrbEX Network and invited the participants to think of how they would like to be involved in it. There was a dedicated space for everyone to exchange contacts and interests - during the whole conference there was a mural where the guests were able to leave their contacts and add what kind of experience they had.
Our invitation for organisations to join the Network is still open. If you work in the field of urban exploration and are interested in research, organisation, facilitation, and networking - you are more than welcome to join!
