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Urban Injections
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In 2024, Studio Madane was awarded a participation scholarship to the Future Earth Summit in Helsinki, a global gathering of researchers, urbanists, scientists, and policy actors organized around the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The studio joined Room SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities & Communities), where the work of Urban Injections came into contact with practitioners doing parallel work in radically different geographies and political contexts. Within the 6-month work, we coined the term ‘Biodiversity Informality’ as the premise of our plan.
Partnershing with Trophica Lab, a Bogotá-based practice working on urban regeneration in Colombian contexts, the two studios merged frameworks to layer the Urban Injections model with one of its previously underdeveloped dimensions: mixed-community stakeholdership. Trophica Lab's experience with Bogotá's heterogeneous neighborhoods showed Studio Madane that the Karantina–Nahr Beirut–Bourj Hammoud corridor wasn't only a contested urban perimeter: it was a mixed-community problem, where ownership of the tactical urbanism intervention had to be designed for groups that don't already share political or cultural ground.
The joint thesis that emerged: initiatives that support sustainable cities and communities, and prioritize long-term change, must focus on Human Systems, Urban Reform, and Social Cohesion.
The collaboration produced ideation work, project design, grant search and writing, and a pitch delivered to change-makers, urbanists, scientists, and engineers across the summit's SDG rooms. The pitch was subsequently submitted to several grant programs. The project is currently on hold, but the framework, and the cross-border methodology that produced it, travels with the studio.