Hi. I am Felipe Schmidt Fonseca. This wiki hosts the open documentation of my PhD research, which was part of the OpenDoTT project (Northumbria University / University of Dundee / Mozilla Foundation). The title of my investigation is Generous cities – weaving commons-oriented systems for the reuse of excess materials in urban contexts. I have completed the submission of my thesis on 30/06/2023 and successfully defended it on 21/09/2023. A final version was submitted in March 2024 and is due to be reviewed by the examination board.
My main doctoral supervisor is Dr Nick Spencer (Northumbria University). My supervisory team is also composed of Professor Mel Woods (University of Dundee), Dr Nick Taylor (Newcastle University) and Solana Larsen (Mozilla Foundation).
The core argument of my research is that we need to reimagine and reshape how cities handle excess materials - understood here as the objects and materials prematurely discarded or kept unused for various reasons. Instead of focusing on industrial recycling, my take is to prioritise community-based practices of reuse. Such initiatives are crucial not only to identify and act upon the potential economic value of goods and materials immediately present in virtually every locality, but also to promote social cohesion, inclusion and regeneration while helping mitigate the effects of climate change.
During the four years of research I have conducted studies, made extensive notes, created design concepts and prototypes, and manufactured reports and materials for workbooks. This website will host the most relevant parts of the materials produced during the investigation. It is currently a work in progress. I will be gradually moving more contents, publications, research notes and concept ideas here.
The video below is an online presentation of my paper Reuse Commons - a toolkit to weave generous cities for the 2022 edition of Fab City Summit. It summarises my research up to that point, as well as providing context on how it was developed.
The presentation can also be watched from the Internet Archive or Youtube.
OpenDoTT ("Open Design of Trusted Things") was "a PhD programme to explore how to build a more open, secure, and trustworthy Internet of Things". The project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813508. The doctoral training started in 2019 at the University of Dundee and later the whole project moved to Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The leading industrial partner was the Mozilla Foundation, together with a group of other organisations that compose the OpenDoTT consortium.
The website was built using wiki.js. I am experimenting with its ability to sync to a git repository (this one, to be specific). At the present moment, this feature is not completely stable - I had to downgrade wiki.js in order to import a previous backup. I hope the developers improve it in the near future. This is important as a way to future-proof the contents of this website in the shape of markdown files stored under a folder structure that is as software-agnostic as possible without losing its human readability. I also expect future versions of wiki.js to enable other kinds of permanently backing up contents.