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The Challenge
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How might we restore vibrancy in cities and regions facing economic decline?
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Mission #1
Explore Vibrancy
Share your definition of what vibrancy looks like where you live.
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Mission #2
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Tell us about the cities and communities you know are currently struggling or in the process of revitalising.
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Take some time to get active and explore your own community – then report back what you learned.
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Mission #4
Collect Insights
Interview someone living in a struggling city or region to learn more.
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Mission #5
Surprise Us
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Inspiration
Mission #2
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The One Millionth Tower project gets powered by Steelcase! A story of smart scaling.
Over a billion of us live in deteriorating apartment buildings, and in One Millionth Tower, we wanted to discover how harnessing the spirit of the people who live inside can help re-imagine the bleak highrise landscape, anywhere in the world.
Did you know: The concrete highrise is the most commonly built form over the last century? Some may call these slab giants in the sky "eyesores," but over a billion of us around the world call them home.
Over the decades, these old highrises have aged and are falling into disrepair. Some are renovated, some are completed razed, but for the most part, they are left to decay.
In the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), one of the world's most multicultural cities, there are over 2,000 of these residential towers. Many of these towers are inhabited by newcomers who might have hardship integrating, let alone feel they can contribute to city-building and sadly sit upon a vast amount of land left uncultivated and unimagined.
One Millionth Tower is an innovative attempt to re-imagine a better life in the "global highrise," spearheaded by the filmmaker-in-residence at Canada's National Film Board.
The use of space around these buildings is modeled in a virtual landscape, helping tens of thousands of residents (not to mention the influencers at the City) imagine the possibilities.
Immeasurably unique is the combination at work here: This is a native-web documentary that brings together residents, architects, animators and web developers to tell the story of "speculatively transforming physical space in a 3D virtual landscape, directly in the browser."
Not only is the project challenging the way we plan residential and common space, but it's also transforming the use of technology we have at our fingertips to imagine these plans. To be clear on how cool this really is: When it rains at the Toronto Highrise pilot site, it is raining in One Millionth Tower.
"The highrise building for us is a great storytelling prism. It's a metaphor, and it's a way for us to address 'the future of cities' in a concrete, human way," says Gerry Flahive, the Senior Producer who leads the production through "formats that haven't been invented yet."
A few well-known local musicians worked to score the documentary in a "mixed tape" approach, which spoke to the collaborative nature of the project.
Tangible action is already happening: As the virtual work was still being completed, Kaboom, a nfp that brings play to neighbourhoods in need, awarded Toronto Highrise residents a grant to build a playground on the site.
One Millionth Tower was piloted in Toronto, but was always intended as a scalable project. What if Steelcase helped scale this model to other cities and regions? Leveraging its international networks, skillset and products, it could "power" tower renewal projects worldwide by creating plans for implementation and sponsorship coalitions to accelerate the realization phase.
Mission #2
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December 05, 2011, 07:01PM
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Reclaimed in Detroit
Inspirations this built upon
Bangkok's Low-interest Loans for Building Retrofits = win-win-win
