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WHY DOES ST. PETERSBURG NEED A SPACE DEVOTED TO URBAN DESIGN AND VISUAL CULTURE? 

THE CITY IS CHANGING During last years there has been a growth of attention of the citizens towards urban evi- ronment, projects and initiatives focused on its improvement. The city is considered not only as a buffer zone between home, work and entertainment — it is actively used as a place for realisation of ideas, self-identity and personal growth. More 'Third places' are emerging: cafes, co-working spaces, cultural and educational projects. But still, St. Petersburg is missing an accessible venue for interaction of people interested in transforming the city image. 

THERE ARE THINGS TO IMPROVE There is a lot of ways to transform the city image. Difficulties exist not only in the infra- structure or administration system, but also in everyday actions: inconvenience and lack of accessibility of urban environment and its elements, low level of visual culture in outdoor advertising and navigation, unattractiveness of some districts and low attention to people with disabilities. In addition to this, at the moment there is no educational institution or program to prepare specialists who can tangle this kind of problems. Classical educational system doesn't have connections to real life issues or problematics, doesn't involve experts or professionals or adopt best practices from outer sources. 

MAKE IT CENTER was opened in July 2012 in a loft space of former printing factory ‘Lenpoligraphmash’ on the embankment of river Karpovka. The Center is a socio-cultural educational project focused on creation of a space where designers, architects, urbanists and city activ- ists could interact, study, share experiences and inspire each other. 

The emergence of places like Make it Center is a positive trend in the development of the city: interest to public spaces means that the comfort zone of the citizens grows and starts to include above apartment and workplace something else which is not in their direct possession. This process is called bottom-up approach as citizens trans- form from being passive observers of the changing environ- ment to becoming participants in design and development process of the surrounding space. 

EDUCATION We think that educational activities in the field of urban design and development can help to bring together active citizens and give them tools, methods and approaches to solve complex issues of improving the city image and environment. We want our educational activities to create a habit of changing surrounding space among the activists and a habit of accepting these changes among the citizens. In Make it Center we see a possibility to create an environment for interaction between professionals in the area of urbanism and city development, giving them ground for communication and personal growth though transmission of knowledge. 

APPROACH Our approach to education includes several methodologies which seem to us most appro- priate in the conditions of already build histori- cal environment. We actively look around and try to adopt positive experiences of other cities paying attention to Scandinavian countries and their approaches, for example, to creating comfort- able conditions for people in public spaces in the cold time of the year. We plan to involve specialists from different countries and back- ground to the educational process and will be establishing connections with educational institutions in Europe. 

PROJECTS A distinctive feature of educational process will be working real-life projects in corporation with stakeholders, private and public organi- sations of the city with the aim of improving the quality of urban environment of St. Peters- burg. We would like to bring together designers, interested parties and potential developers and give them possibility to communicate and listen to each other to search for the best solu- tions for the proposed tasks. 

AUDIDENCE Our target audience for educational activ- ities consists of several groups: for more experienced students we are developing a two-months intensive program where will be speaking about interconnected aspects of urban design and visual culture: not only archi- tecture and urban planning, but also objects, information, multi-functionality and aesthetic qualities of surrounding space. For people with any background and skills there will be short courses focused on narrower topics of typography, poster, design manage- ment and illustration. Our special interest is to develop a program for high school students: for them we will create a number of lessons where they will learn about how cities are created and maintained, which professions exist today in the area of design, how to set personal goals and achieve them. 

CONTACT We invite all interested persons and organi- sations to collaboration and partnership. Write us on [email protected], or see us at the embankment of Karpovka river, building one, last floor. If you would like to stay in touch with our news and updates, join our mailing list by drop- ping us a line on [email protected].