Sustainability is an important topic on the agenda of many cities today, certainly since the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were officially launched in 2016. To further investigate this meaning of sustainability on the level of the city and its citizens, a group of local and international students, designers, artists and architects and the city of Hasselt worked together to see how people share (in) their city today and how this can advance the sustainable development goals.

During PDC’18 we present an interactive exhibition that discusses the role of PD in contemplating on and articulating the political potential of spatial sharing in the city in addressing these sustainability challenges. On the one hand, we showcase how communities already organise and share their common concerns, goods or information (i.e. commoning) in Hasselt, often on a micro-level. On the other hand, we present design proposals that experiment with how spatial practitioners can give form to infrastructures to support these practices to relate to or act against various institutional frames on a meso- and macro-scale to disclose and enhance their political potential and gain impact on a supra-local level (i.e. institutioning).

The situated action invites participants to reflect on different types of sharing detected in Hasselt (care-, value-, trade- and need-based sharing). Together they discuss what actions can contribute to the development of institutioning as a conscious practice by designers to develop infrastructures that can enhance the political potential of self-initiated and already existing sharing on different scale levels.

Project by Teresa Palmieri, Liesbeth Huybrechts, Oswald Devisch and Roel De Ridder