urbanNext interviews Ania Molenda & Cristina Ampatzidou on amateurcities.com and their aim to provide a platform for a dialogue on urban collective intelligence.
’UrgentCity: Towards a New Vocabulary of Terms’ event in Florence 2016. Photo: Luca Chiaudano
Could you tell us a little about Amateur Cities?
Amateur Cities is an online publishing platform and research agency on alternative ways of city-making, presented critically. We like to say that it is a research-through-publishing project.
We started Amateur Cities in 2014 to provide a platform for a dialogue on urban collective intelligence, combining both theoretical and practical voices. Since then, we have been publishing articles that collect, analyze and clarify contemporary urban and technological developments, in order to learn about cities anew – not as masters, but as amateurs. Gradually, we also became more active offline. We have been engaged in various research projects that have resulted in workshops, debates and exhibitions. Ultimately, we think they are all forms of publishing. Our goal is to stimulate cross-sector exchange by engaging experts from different disciplines, such as architecture, urbanism, art, science, information technology, media, sociology, and philosophy, to talk about cities.
