The topic is not really new. At the end of the 2000s,  some sociologists and urban planners had prefigured the emergence of a “city 2.0” referring to the emergence of collaborative practices on the Internet: blogs , Wikipedia and maps that made digital more prevalent in our cities.

Even though collaborative planning is not necessarily linked to digital, the consultation process is now common for most urban projects. Thereforce, user-generated urbanism might be the future of cities.

In France, the phenomenon has reached a new level with the birth of Wikibuilding. The building would be designed within a wiki process, all plans and experimentations being open source. Any citizen would be able to draw, to use, to improve or to test the building. Promoters or insurers would test the wikibuilding with residents, real estate agencies and 5% of the area would be reserved for a living Lab. Wikibuilding would be a place for experimentation and open to the architecture schools in order to design and include continuous Open Design updates. The Paris School of Architecture is already working with wikibuilding.

Is wikibuilding the future of architecture, like Le Corbusier was one day?
Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was influential in urban planning and a founding member of the Congrès international d’architecture moderne (CIAM). Corbusier prepared the master plan for the planned city of Chandigarh in India, and contributed specific designs for several buildings all around the world.

In the 1930s, Le Corbusier expanded and reformulated his ideas on urbanism in La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City). In the Radiant City, Le Corbusier abandoned the class-based stratification: housing was now assigned according to family size and not economic position. Le Corbusier challenged architecture and capitalism.

Wikibuilding is designed according to and by users.

Will Wikibuilding be as powerful as Le Corbusier?

Picture by Robert-Doisneau (1953)