We collect experiences from residents and visitors to understand how art influences the character of a city.
Beautiful, together collects stories about public art in Brussels. However, the project is open for any city to join.
Beautiful, together is a test pilot to monitor the effects of the Programme 101e% run by the Société du Logement de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, which funds unique contemporary works of art on public housing sites to enhance the well-being of tenants and the quality of public spaces.
Why anecdotes and personal experiences?
Personal experiences are a bridge that connects facts with specific cultures and individual emotions. They offer an opportunity to understand how events, situations or, in our case, cultural artifacts and performances trigger different individual responses. At scale, they can help to identify patterns and pathways towards positive, beautiful experiences.
The stories that we collect in beautiful, together are part of an open process known as "Mass-Sense" that allows diverse narratives and interpretations to co-exist. It is especially useful to understand how the same phenomenon creates distinct experiences in different persons. In this sense, the project does not seek a single, binary definition of what art in public space means or is, but rather seeks divergence and articulation.
In addition to understanding the nuanced effects of public art, divergence can also help to form a new, bottom-up, democratic definition of public art. In this exercise, the definition of "work of art" is open to everyone's interpretation from an experiential point of view, while sensemaking sessions help to build a coherent and democratic understanding of what creates beautiful experiences.
Beautiful, together hopes to inspire neighbors to demand more opportunities for shared beauty, while encouraging advocacy organizations and policy makers to derive insights for beautiful policies at the city and neighborhood level. Sensemaking together is a prerequisite for understanding what beautiful means for a specific community, and for enabling beautiful experiences through political activism, commercial projects, artistic research, etc.
All contributions are collected online and offline and saved online in a sensemaking platform (the SenseMaker), to create a publicly accessible, shared journal. This method for public awareness is based on the same sense-making methodology that was adopted during the New European Bauhaus co-design phase.
Learn how to define impact from the stories you collect
85 stories, June 2024
The report is a first high-level demonstration on how stories become a measure for impact.
Measure the impact of public art in your city or town.
Join this project to measure the social return on your investment in art and culture.
See your city through the eyes of residents and visitors. Learn how art is building your city's reputation, and how it is influencing the quality of the public space. Build a repository of memories that documents how your city feels like, in time.
Gather stories on a specific work of art, on a collection, on an area or a neighbourhood. Or just gather stories from the entire city.
We offer different forms of collaboration (yes, a free option is also available!) to can start collecting stories immediately!
The stories
