See the full slide show from the session right here

Session

OBA NEXT is Amsterdam’s public library that is scheduled to open in 2028 in the Southeast of Amsterdam. OBA Next is more than a new building. It is an innovative program to co-create a library of the future with community residents.

Our ambition is to create a process that is enriching for the local communities and stakeholders in the culturally diverse Amsterdam Zuidoost and also be an attractive go too for the whole city. However, the creation of this new library is inherently a top down, system led decision made by the city and the public library of Amsterdam in which the local communities have not been consulted. This poses OBA Next for a messy challenge: how can this new library from the start be developed in an open, inclusive and human
centered manner, while the funding and decision-making processes take place in a highly political and hierarchical manner?

Furthermore, the community of Southeast, having suffered from many top down, city government led decisions are extremely wary and distrustful of anything coming from the ‘central city’. There is a strong sense of local identity and the need to reinforce existing structures and initiatives. For this reason we are looking for a design for social and community inclusion in which we go from: Politics to People, Meet up to Stitch up, Participation to Empowerment, Programme to Platform, Staff to Community, Leadership to Partners, Helping to Learning, and Mediocracy to Superior.

We believe that a truly democratic society requires such a transition and that a library of the future needs to be set up, organized, and run according to these principles. Therefore, the ideas and results from the workshop will be used in the further planning of the library.

The purpose of the session is to give input to the design of a participatory and inclusive library community engagement strategy for planning and realization of OBA Next in the Southeast of Amsterdam, a cutting-edge library for the future intended to be designed for, by and with Amsterdammers.

The session set-up is as follows:

Three short presentations: 1) one the role of libraries in democratic societies, 2) on the ambitions and set up of OBA Next and 3) on the local characteristics of South East. After these introductory presentations our main challenges and the proposed transition will be presented.
Attendees will then break out in small groups and will be asked to develop a roadmap for the making of OBA Next according to these above principles. The roadmap should include suggestions on how to set up the innovation programme (activities and content), the new building (architecture) and the organization and governance model (accountability).

After 30 minutes working in the subgroups insights and results will be presented in the plenum after which concluding remarks and learned lessons will be inventoried.

Maximum capacity: 25-32 people

Hosts

Chris Sigaloff, Rolf Hapel & Angelique Hoogmoed

Chris Sigaloff currently works as the project leader for OBA Next, a new public library for the city of Amsterdam. Chris is an expert in the field of social innovation and civil society. She has worked as a director, developer, and advisor with the goal of implementing creative solutions for complex societal issues. For over 10 years she was the director of a thinktank based in Amsterdam, which remains an important player in the field of social innovation, education, copyright and digital heritage.

Rolf Hapel is a library advisor and affiliate instructor at University of Washington. He was director of Citizens’ Services and Libraries in Aarhus. Some of his accomplishments include planning and realizing Dokk1 and serving as an expert in architectural competitions for libraries in Oslo and Helsinki.

Angelique Hoogmoed is a curator, programmer and community coordinator working (and living) in the Southeast of Amsterdam. Currently she works at New Metropolis, a platform for social innovation and creation with a specific focus on the city and community building. Angelique is extremely passionate in bringing together grass routes initiatives in order to arrive at sustainable solutions for urgent social issues. She organises programmes, festivals and many other events bringing diverse communities together.