How To Reprogram The City A Toolkit For Adaptive Reuse And Repurposing

How to Reprogram the City: A toolkit for Adaptive Reuse and Repurposing

How to Reprogram the City is a 40-page self-guided collection of insights, examples, and exercises to help people discover the untapped potential in their own city. Based on dozens of workshops held around the world, this is the first time the Reprogramming the City methodology has been documented in workbook form. The toolkit provides people with the tools to address a pressing problem: the new reality facing cities is one of limited resources. Whether financial, spatial, or material, the content of cities is finite. Yet the context of that content – how we use the assets we already have – is where the opportunity exists to respond to increasing urban needs using limited resources. The dozens of workshops I have led in numerous cities have honed my abilities to get people to think outside the box – to move their thinking from “this is” to “this could” – and shown me the most effective way to provide them with the tools to improve life in their city using what they already have. It has been, and continues to be, a tremendous privilege to work with groups of people from numerous cities on repurposing urban objects to do more with the structures, surfaces and systems in their city. I realized though that a toolkit can reach far more people than I am able to. In short: it is time to open up the opportunities that urban resourcefulness can create. This toolkit is meant to serve as a companion to the Reprogramming the City book. The book is a global overview of how the urban landscape’s untapped potential is being utilized to improve life in cities using what already exists in new ways.

Adaptive Reuse Toolkit: How Cities Can Turn Their Industrial Legacy Into Infrastructure for Innovation and Growth

RE-USA

Based on best-practice examples in American cities such as Detroit, New York, or Pittsburgh, this book shows successful cases of adaptive reuse that preserve the legacy of the industrial past while turning it into a key ingredient for urban regeneration. An aquaponics farm in a former meatpacking facility or a freight train railroad converted into a linear park: these are just two successful examples of the creative and effective reuse of abandoned industrial infrastructure. Culture, leisure, sport, research, education, design, services, production, housing, and even agriculture regenerate former factory sites and upgrade cities economically and culturally. Eight steps guide the way through the process of adaptive reuse from choosing an existing site to the vision, design, and funding, and finally their implementation. Professionals, activists, decision-makers, as well as entrepreneurs and committed citizens worldwide are therefore provided with a practical toolkit to discovering the unused potential of their city.