Ideas are only the beginning.
Across cities, promising ideas are everywhere. Some emerge from residents. Others come from artists, researchers, public institutions, entrepreneurs, or experiments taking place halfway around the world.
But a good idea is not yet a working solution. The difficult part is bringing the right people together, adapting an idea to its surroundings, testing it in real life, and learning whether it actually works. That is the work of Open Air Studio.
01 — WHAT WE DO
An Urban Implementation Studio
Open Air Studio is an implementation studio based in Sarajevo. We develop practical experiments in response to urban problems. Sometimes that means creating something new. Sometimes it means finding a promising solution that already exists and adapting it to a different place. Often, it means connecting people who would not ordinarily work together around something tangible they can build and test. Our projects can take many forms: a public installation, an environmental intervention, an artist collaboration, a new use of public space, or a small pilot designed to answer a much larger question.
We begin with the problem—not a predetermined solution.
02 — HOW WE WORK
Why a Studio?
We chose the word studio deliberately. A studio is a place where different disciplines meet and ideas become visible. It allows people to make something, examine it, change it, and try again. Work can begin before every answer is known. That spirit shapes our approach:
01 Define the problem. 02 Find promising solutions. 03 Test + Learn. 04 Scale what works.
Not every pilot should grow. Some are valuable because they reveal what does not work, what needs to change, or what a city is not yet ready to support. The purpose of testing solutions is to find the ideas that deserve to go further.
03 — PUBLIC EXPERIMENTATION
We make ideas tangible early enough to question them, test them in real conditions, and improve them through use.
Open Air Studio is not interested in disappearing behind closed doors and returning with a finished answer. We develop projects in public, alongside the people who understand a place from the inside. We document what happens—including what fails—so that each experiment contributes knowledge, not just activity. This is how trust is built, how better solutions emerge, and how an isolated pilot becomes something other people can learn from, adapt, and carry forward. We want to work with residents, artists, researchers, public institutions, businesses, funders, and practical optimists who are ready to move beyond discussing what should happen—and begin discovering what can.
04 — LOCAL GROUNDING
Why Sarajevo?
Sarajevo is a city of extraordinary creativity, ingenuity, and resilience. It is also a place where urgent problems are visible in everyday life—and where good ideas too often stall between conversation and implementation. That makes it an unusually powerful place to test promising solutions. Sarajevo is large enough for its problems to matter and small enough for relationships, learning, and action to move quickly. Its history and geography bring culture, public life, environmental pressures, and questions of belonging into unusually close contact.
Open Air Studio was founded here not because Sarajevo needs somebody else’s answers, but because it can become a place where locally grounded solutions are developed, demonstrated, and shared with other cities.
05 — OUR PRINCIPLES
I
Tangible Action
We believe in the power of testing ideas in real life to learn whether they actually work before scaling.
II
Joint Learning
A studio is where disciplines meet. We connect people who would not ordinarily work together.
III
Local Grounding
We begin with the problem, adapting existing solutions to the unique history and geography of a place.
OPEN AIR STUDIO
info@openairstudio.org
Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina