Great news of 2025! We moved our address to Blivande, a cultural center in the Frihamnen area of Stockholm that has their focus on participatory arts and culture. This move will benefit both Metvibee and Blivande, and further our goal of creating a participatory urban design and placemaking culture in Stockholm and other cities around the world.
So, why Blivande, what is it, and what’s in store for Metvibee? Read on to find out!
Why Blivande?
Blivande is an important hub for artists, designers, and many other creatives in Stockholm. They work in diverse fields such as UX design, architecture, tech, art, and a lot more.
While it provides indoor and outdoor spaces for co-working, organizing workshops, and making craft, it’s much more than a co-working space—it’s a community space where projects and events are created together by the community.
Metvibee is moving there as we believe to gain traction for participatory urban design using augmented reality (AR), we need a great community as a base to showcase and share what we do with fellow community members, and from there to spread on to the world.
The outdoor space is part of the placemaking initiative Frihamnstorget, which aims to develop the former free port area of Stockholm (Frihamnen) into a beloved place for creative arts, local residents, events and parties, and small local businesses.
Blivande and Frihamnstorget are in the center of the Frihamnen area, which the city plans to develop into a mixed use neighborhood with new homes, offices, shops, facilities and a lot more, making use of the port and water to create a sustainable and human-friendly urban environment. We believe Metvibee would be a great fit in this area to help Stockholmers explore participatory urban design processes.
How will this move benefit participatory design culture in Stockholm?
Participatory urban design relies on cross-disciplinary collaboration and co-creation to create sustainable and humanistic spaces for citizens and residents. Urban development projects and placemaking initiatives benefit from the diversity of knowledge of the participants in the project development process.
Blivande’s diverse community, with members working in different discipline and a culture that prides itself on community-led co-creation, is the perfect place in Stockholm to promote and showcase a participatory urban design tool like Metvibee. It offers many opportunities for collaboration with creatives, and to showcase projects to improve public space.
As one of the most important community-led cultural centers in Stockholm, Blivande is also the convening member for the Stockholm chapter of the New European Bauhaus community, which includes organizations, urban practitioners, and small companies in the city that have a common goal on making our city better and more sustainable.
We expect Metvibee and the Blivande community to be able to create synergy in this co-creative and playful environment, so as to create dynamic and playful visions for public spaces and urban development. In so doing, we can create a participatory culture for urban development in Stockholm and beyond.
What’s next?
At present, Metvibee’s involvement would be to participate in community activities and to make use of Blivande’s facilities to create designed objects for powerful marketing campaigns.
Coming up, we’ll start organizing co-creative evenings and workshops, and invite creatives like you to come and play with AR designs using Metvibee.
As summer comes, we’ll also move outdoors to Frihamnstorget to offer “portals” and activities to showcase how Metvibee can help citizens and residents participate and design better cities together.
Stay tuned to “portals” and activities on Frihamnstorget!
So we wrote “portal” here—why, you might ask? 🙂
AR offers a “different” world for us to dive into and be creative—”different” is in quotes here, as the AR world is both imaginary and real, both distinct from and juxtaposed with our world, both created by us and received by us.
Technology offers a portal for us to dive into this “other” world and to participate in play and co-creation. During urban development, a site is transformed into a new vision, a new space. Through the Metvibee AR “portals”, you can participate in this process already by jumping in and have a hand in shaping this vision.
Coming summer, with the “portals” you’ll be able to dive into a co-creative world of urban design with Metvibee. Not only will you be able to see what other people have designed, but you can also actively participate in it.
See you there!
