Hands-on Famagusta presents: Model of the whole city of Famagusta & Tri-Lingual Web Platform

The Project The “Hands-on-Famagusta” project comprises of inter-related activities using participatory urban design processes to facilitate dialogue about the urban future of Famagusta across the divide, paving the way for future collaboration and further cohabitations in a post-conflict Cyprus. The focus of Hands-on Famagusta is to empower Cypriot civil society regarding urban transformation processes for a unified Famagusta. As such, it has produced several major tools to facilitate the ongoing public debate: interactive web-platform, model of the entire city, off-line workshops and presentations, survey. The Hands-on Famagusta web platform is devoted in imagining a common urban future for a unified Famagusta. It is a smart visual archive of possibilities, encouraging the user to support actions that promote the commons of the city. We present at the exhibition: an easy transportable city model made of twenty parts, 3D printed and total size of 5.5 meters long and 1.8 meters wide. It represents Famagusta as a whole with all its constituent urban entitiesand wants to initiate imaginaries of common urban future. The model is animated by multimedia projections depicting controversial matters that may emerge during the processes of the city’s reconstruction after a political agreement takes place. It is a tool for public debate supporting communities to engage with possibilities of building the city’s commons, allowing the creation of a unified Famagusta. The idea of having atri-lingual web platform, (www.handsonfamagusta.org), in English, Greek and Turkish,was part of its initial conceptualization. With the support of the Renewal program and through collaboration with professional translators (GeorgeFloros, Alexander Gioumouxouzisand YeşimÖzben), we organized a workshop in Famagusta in October 2015, where we debated over the challenge of translating practicein contested spaces, with the valuable support of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriot volunteers. The final version of the translation, as it came out of our workshop, is the tri-lingual web platform input, thus making it widely accessible to all the Greek speaking and Turkish speaking Cypriots. Their engagement with the content of the web-platform will empower them in regards to the decisions to be taken about Famagusta’s urban future.