As part of the Pedestrian Space ‘Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab’ and network in development, we are recording our conversations with incoming collaborators around the world, as well as students pursuing academic internships related to the project.
As part of that, we recently met with Veljko Armano Linta, Citizen Engagement Coordinator for the city of Zagreb, who works to boost his team’s capacity to engage citizens and other stakeholders in tackling their two challenges: urban heat and a welcoming city.
Veljko is interested in sharing and learning how others might be doing just that, but also in learning about what works in other cities when we want to make a tangible, measurable difference in how citizens live through heat. They focus on this by combining agile projects with a systemic approach and combining place-based and service-based interventions. Their team has done informal and semi-structured interviews, focus groups, a city-wide survey, a pop-up shading intervention, heat-and-vulnerability mapping, and conversations with activist experts and researchers. Personally, he’s very interested in combining climate adaptation with climate mitigation and climate justice at a structural level.
For him, this means going beyond capitalism, zero-sum competition, extraction, neocolonialism, and top-down governance. In other words, moving towards regenerative cultures and putting the economy in service of societies serving ecosystems we’re part of – decent living standards, equity, community building, personal development, and joy, all within planetary boundaries and with an awareness that we can be a constructive part of the web of life on Earth.
His background includes running a studio for participatory regenerative architecture, designing and facilitating workshops and courses on sustainability and sociocratic teamwork, leading the design of interdisciplinary teaching scenarios on sustainable development for the Croatian public school system, writing peer-reviewed papers and an award-winning book.
More importantly, he is a dad with a passion for music, improvisational cooking, forests, lakes, and fjords.
Learn more about the Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab below: