About Social Streets:

Guided by this vision, Italy’s Social Streets was launched to increase opportunities for meaningful neighbour interaction through self-organizing groups. Its goal is to help residents of a particular street get to know one another—establish enduring bonds, exchange hyper-local knowledge, and share needs, all by preparing a collective meal or carrying out projects of common interest.

It has been almost two years since Social Street Italy was born from the idea that people should be more connected in the places they call home. Since then, more than 350 groups in Italy and around the world have sprouted up with the intent of bringing people together, enabling them to organize street events, lunches, concerts, and a whole range of other local activities and initiatives.

But that was not necessarily founder Federico Bastiani’s initial goal. A freelance journalist and dad of one, Federico was tired of seeing his son playing on his own, and thus started a Facebook group for residents of Via Fondazza — his home street in Bologna — as an experiment to see if his interactions with other residents could go beyond the fleeting “buongiorno” they were all so used to exchanging. Shortly thereafter, Federico’s Facebook group shot up to 800 members and counting, in the process inspiring many others around the world to follow his lead.

And it’s not just residents who are paying attention. Social Street’s basic premise is a simple one, but one that has resonated widely across the country, where the organization has been featured repeatedly in some the Italy’s most followed national news outlets, radio shows, online dailies and even TEDx events. Abroad, the organization has even garnered the attention of academics including London School of Economics’ Anthony Giddens and transition pioneers such as Rob Hopkins.

Are you intrigued by the idea of getting to know your neighbours and seeing where that could take you?

Follow these steps to learn how to set up your very own Social Street in your city or community:

1. Create a closed group on Facebook

Social Street recommends a closed group to protect the privacy of your members and potentially encourage higher sign-up rates. This can be done using the group settings when you create your Facebook group, but remember: people before pixels! The use of an online network should encourage offline interaction, not just end at the digital level.

To be found among the other Facebook groups that are a part of Social Street, be sure to use the proper name convention for your group: “Residents of [street name (or square, neighborhood, etc.)] – city – social street.” (e.g. “Residents of Queen Street West, Toronto – Social Street”)

Form a small board that can help feed content, manage comments, and lead the conversation into actionable plans and events.

2. Advertise the group

Print out copies of a poster that includes the details of your Facebook group, encouraging people to join. Post copies in a variety of highly visible settings like parks, apartment buildings, restaurants, schools, and laundromats.

3. Manage the group

There shouldn’t be just one person in charge. Everyone should have the ability to participate and engage in the online group’s activities, but there should be a smaller group that helps grow the conversation and organize some small actions around the comments and conversations that are happening.

4. Step into the street

Once you have engaged a small group of interested neighbours, you are ready for your Social Street. Guide people based on their interests to plan and organize a public event involving all group members as a first ‘get to know you.’ Make the event open for other people to join in as well. Keep the conversations going and use the group as a forum to plan the next meetings and activities.

5. Measure your success

The success of these groups is totally subjective. But if you’ve brought together a group of people who didn’t know each other before, and connected people through common interests, you can consider your Social Street a success!

Here are a few tried and true tips from Social Street Italy on ensuring your group’s success:

• Select a clearly demarcated area: Opt for a smaller (or at least manageable) area so that you’re truly encouraging ‘street-level’ exchanges that can be relevant to local residents’ daily lives and needs;
• Keep it free: this applies both to internal exchanges as well as the Social Street-wide model. The organization and its groups, in fact, are proudly “absolutely free.”
• Open structure: Each place is unique, so pick the formats that best reflect your local context and culture.
• Inclusion: Focus on what brings people together, not on what divides them. Stay open-minded and consider even your harshest critic’s point of view – it’s important not to isolate yourself from constructive criticism. Use (and encourage the use of) inclusive, non-discriminatory language.

Possibilities are virtually endless, so why not give it a try?

by Chiara Camponeschi and Hillete Warner

The post How to start a social street appeared first on Shareable.


Global Innovators is a nine-part series that celebrates the remarkable work of social innovators from outside the English-speaking world. Twice a month we profile the stories of inspiring community pioneers from across three broad cultural clusters: change enthusiasts from Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world. The series, inspired by the multilingual editions of the Enabling City toolkit, focuses on a rich variety of themes that explore 'enabling' frameworks for participatory social change

Bryan Boyer is an architect and former Strategic Design Lead at The Finnish Innovation Fund (SITRA) in Helsinki, Finland. After a successful and productive time away, Bryan is back in North America working to bring Makeshift Society Brooklyn to life. We spoke with him today about his work in Helsinki, his Kickstarter Campaign for Makeshift Society, and 21^st century local decision-making.

Enabling City: Bryan, you are one of the minds behind Brickstarter. Tell us more about the project, what was the idea behind it and what issues you were hoping to address? 

Bryan Boyer: Brickstarter was a provocation that asked whether we could use technology more effectively to support civic entrepreneurship. The first spur came from the notion of NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) and how difficult it is to make bold developments in a city (think public transportation, renewable energy initiatives, or anything that will give shape to our cities in the next century.) We found that the technology is not really the issue­ (we know how to build a wind turbine)–what it boils down to is coming to the decision that as a community we are ready to accept these kinds of things in our backyard. With Brickstarter, we wanted to move away from NIMBY and toward YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard), so governance around our neighbourhoods and cities was one of the entry points for that.

Entrepreneurship was another one, because as pop-ups seem to demonstrate, more people than ever are interested in changing the city today. In Finland, a pop-up restaurant is treated as separate from the formal life of the city, which means that the administration largely ignores the offering(s) it represents. Helsinki's hugely popular food festival, which happens four times a year, was started when aspiring restauranteurs realized how hard the bureaucratic process of opening a restaurant actually is. From the macro perspective, it would be great if all of the energy that goes into festivals of this kind was applied to making the city have its desired services and cultural experiences rather than just the pop-ups.

The third interest followed a more traditional business perspective. If you’re considering opening a small industrial facility – or, as is now my case – a co-working space, then as a small business you don't have the kind of data about the neighbourhood and its economy to back your decisions. Providing an avenue for the community to express its interests and desires is a way to simultaneously support local economic activity. Brickstarter was an attempt to bridge these three perspectives and provide a platform to understand – and enhance – the interfaces between citizens, communities, and institutions. 

Helsinki Street Eats, a book about everyday food published by SITRA

EC: Brickstarter has met with incredible success from the very beginning, though recently the practice of 'urban crowdfunding' has come under close scrutiny. What is your relationship with urban crowdfunding, and how has Brickstarter tried to address some of the pitfalls associated with it.

BB: There is huge potential in crowdfunding the city, but it’s not a straightforward process. We launched Brickstarter at a time when we wanted to add a voice to the discussion and push it out of pure hype. Arguments like “Hey, you can raise $10-million to make a watch on Kickstarter, so let’s just do the same thing for our fire stations or our bike lanes” are simply not realistic.

Brickstarter processes differ from the more conventional crowdfunding of products in five key ways. The first is cost. If we’re talking about crowdfunding a bench, then we could probably find enough people to successfully complete the project. But are we going to crowdfund an 800-million Euro expansion of the subway system? Probably not. Which brings up the next question: Are you paying for the thing in itself, or the planning that goes into it? The sheer cost of urban/infrastructural projects requires a different approach if we care about thoughtful decisions being made.

The second tricky area is opportunity cost. Putting a novel on a crowdfunding site does not prohibit anybody else from doing the same thing. But if you make a proposal for the space on the corner of your block to be a kindergarten, then that space can’t also be a movie theatre. This notion of opportunity costs needs to be something that we think through carefully so that we maintain the type of equitable and well-balanced society that we all want to see.

The third area is catchment. If you’re crowdfunding your watch, then your product can be mailed anywhere in the world. My co-working space will never be mailed anywhere, so the potential pool of people who would contribute is immediately much smaller than the abstract idea of a crowdfunding audience. This is why place-specific, multimillion dollar projects are implausible to fund. On the other hand, if there’s a way to support a richer and more robust decision making process, then that in itself is valuable.

The fourth perspective concerns approvals. Crowdfunding large infrastructure projects is fairly new, which means that there is widespread confusion about the approval process. Aside from reporting and accountability at the city level, this makes it difficult to attach a precise timeline to any given project, which in turn means that it’s very difficult to inform funders about what exactly they are funding and how they are contributing to the project. The scale of these projects is what we think makes Brickstarter unique.

Lastly, there's longevity. If somebody crowdfunds a novel, the worst thing that can happen is that the novel turns out to be bad and nobody reads it again. If we crowdfund a small park, there’s the question of upkeep and of who pays for that. That’s something that hasn't yet been tackled head on in these crowdfunding campaigns. Brickstarter wants to create more awareness and clarity around costs, actors and their roles – considerations that make civic crowdfunding significantly different from product crowdfunding.

Brickstarter

EC: Have you noticed any major obstacles/barriers to the implementation of the "Brickstarter model" in Helsinki or abroad? 

BB: We didn’t build Brickstarter entirely on our own because we thought it was important for the city to also be involved. An important consideration is whether those involved have the funds to successfully engage in open-ended development projects (which of course goes hand in hand with changing a City's approvals and decision-making processes.) The founders of Helsinki's food festival quickly realized that their Facebook following was more useful to them than endeavouring to make the hard slog through the paperwork necessary to open a restaurant. They could create this festival and generate the kinds of outcomes they wanted without having to deal with the City's bureaucratic process.

Now more than ever, cities find themselves in the odd position of having to account for unexpected forms of competition. Those who are genuinely interested in finding a way to funnel, attract, or support civically-minded entrepreneurial activity have a unique opportunity. That is what was ultimately at the heart of the Brickstarter project, and something that we held as a requirement for those involved. 

EC: What is one unexpected lesson or result that you have learned along the way?

BB: There was a gentleman in Helsinki who had started a public bath. He had a really rough time getting it through approval but kept saying: “the civil servants have been really civil.” What he meant by that is that every time he went to the city to ask for a new permit, the people behind the desk at City Hall were supportive of what he as an individual was trying to do. As an institution, however, the City did not have the capacity to support the small entrepreneur because its bureaucracy had been designed to accommodate the needs of large businesses.

In the industrial era we designed our institutions to be this absolutely uniform, completely regular, exactly the same, dependable service. Today we are finding that more and more people are looking to government to be platform for citizen expression, not a turn-key service. 

EC: Brickstarter was part of the Helsinki Design Lab's roster of projects. What other approaches or tools for civic innovation did you explore during your time there?

BB: We looked at everything from new educational platforms to new models of urban development, including low carbon development, civic innovation and welfare. What unfied them all was the design process – everything we took on had a design challenge at its core and had us working in partnership with the local and national governments to solve it. 

The Brickstarter book 

EC: What is in store for Brickstarter now that the project has officially wrapped up? How can we continue the conversation?

BB: We wrapped everything into a publication because the core team members were moving out of Finland and we wanted to make sure our research was freely available. A great thing about working for the government is that, by nature, the work is in the public domain, so the Brickstarter book is available both as a free download and on-demand. The idea was to spread our ideas in the hopes that someone else will build upon it, or that someone who already has a crowdfunding campaign will take this research and use it as a way to think about their project's next steps.

EC: What are you working on now? 

BB: My research interests have evolved into a Brickstarter-type experiment in my new city. I'm working to bring Makeshift Society to Brooklyn. Makeshift was founded by Rena Tom in San Francisco, and we're now in the pre-launch phase of renovating our second space on the East Coast. Despite being one of the largest, most jam-packed cities in America, New York City can still be a lonely place, and a logistically difficult one to navigate. We’re looking at how can we use this co-working space as a platform to support creative entrepreneurs who either want to start or sustain their business. Makeshift is addressing all of their concerns and needs, of which the workspace is only a part. We will also offer classes, skills training, a library full of visual inspiration and business smarts, meeting space, a residency program, and evening events. The San Francisco experience taught us that having a shared workspace is nice, but that there are all sorts of other needs that come into play, some temporary, some ongoing. Access to equipment, for example, is important, so we've made that another part of our mission – and is what we’re hoping to fund through our Kickstarter campaign. The funds raised in this campaign will help us build a creative tool lending library for rental and onsite usage – in other words, the shared, creative resources for making shifts happen.

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Find Bryan on Twitter, and check out Helsinki Design Lab projects' here. Makeshift's campaign is in its final week, click here to back the project or learn more about the space.

The post 21st Century Social Services: An Intervew with Bryan Boyer appeared first on Shareable.

by Chiara Camponeschi

Global Innovators is a nine-part series that celebrates the remarkable work of social innovators from outside the English-speaking world. Twice a month we profile the stories of inspiring community pioneers from across three broad cultural clusters: change enthusiasts from Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world. The series, inspired by the multilingual editions of the Enabling City toolkit, focuses on a rich variety of themes that explore 'enabling' frameworks for participatory social change.

Sarah Toumi is a Franco-Tunisian youth advocate who started DREAM, her organization, as an incubator for Parisian youth with an interest in social entrepreneurship and community innovation. We spoke to Sarah about youth empowerment, co-working spaces, and her most recent project to fight desertification, poverty, and gender inequalities in rural Tunisia.

Enabling City: Your activism started very early, at age 11. Can you tell us a little about what first sparked your desire to get involved?
Sarah Toumi: It all started when I spent some time in the Middle East and Northern Africa, because it’s there that I first discovered poverty and gender inequality. I was living in Paris at the time and those experiences affected me greatly. I wanted to do something about them, so I decided to focus on Tunisia, where my father was from. I founded my first NGO, a centre for youth and women in Bir Salah, when I was 11 – we started with three computers and later evolved into a series of activities some friends from France and I organized over the course of our school holidays.

EC: You won the Ashoka Youth Changemaker Prize when you were 19. How has that experience changed what you do?
ST: I was approached by Ashoka in 2008 following my involvement with various youth organizations in France and abroad. Ashoka supported and coached me, and helped me understand how to sustainably design a project that could advance my vision. I was encouraged to believe in my dreams and to explore how to keep them alive in the long-term, which had a big impact on me.

EC: You and your sister co-founded DREAM, a youth not-for-profit, in 2008. What is DREAM's mission, and what are some of the issues you address? 
ST: After winning the Ashoka youth prize the political climate in Tunisia got worse, so I decided to share what I had learned about social entrepreneurship with other aspiring changemakers in France. DREAM was born out of the desire to coach Parisian students and to help them grow their social and environmental projects. As a first step, we created a documentary on global youth activism focused on the 2008 World Youth Congress in Quebec. Then we welcomed 12 projects-holders to work with us in Paris. At first, DREAM was just a network to support and connect youth who had a common goal, but in 2011 we transitioned to being an incubator for youth-led projects and start-ups, providing access to financial support, volunteer help, office space, mentoring and more.

DREAM is an incubator for social and community projects for students

EC: DREAM also has ties with La maison des initiaties étudiantes, which was one of the first co-working spaces in the world and one of the very few to focus entirely on supporting youth-led projects. How was your experience working from their space? 
ST: La Maison des initiatives étudiantes (MIE) was a fantastic springboard for DREAM. We had more than just access to work space, we could rely on the expertise and advice of veteran mentors. In the early days, MIE supported all of our young project-holders by offering them a platform to showcase their work and attract media attention; today, we still enjoy a strong working relationship and I am happy to see them expanding to four additional locations in Paris.

EC: As a Franco-Tunisian changemaker, you have worked tirelessly to have a positive impact through your projects. What is social innovation/entrepreneurship like in Tunisia?
ST: People often ask me what my “job” is and, no matter where I am, my answer is always “I am a dreamer.” Ninety-nine per cent of them laugh, but there's a one per cent that thinks social entrepreneurship is amazing. 

Tunisia has been under a 23-year-long dictatorship, which is why the right to create a business or organization is new for many people there. Social entrepreneurship is at the very early stages, but it is growing spontaneously – over 14 000 NGOs came to life after the revolution, and the launch of the Tunisian Center for Social Entrepreneurship is proof of the country’s strong desire for change. People need more business training, but the ideas and the determination are certainly there. I have been personally mentoring a few Tunisian social entrepreneurs, and they have wonderful projects covering anything from locally made fair-trade products to independent media, from the social reintegration of prisoners to the cleaning out of phosphate… It’s encouraging.

EC: Outside of your role at DREAM, you are involved in no shortage of interesting side projects and campaigns. What are some of your most recent ones? 
ST: My most recent one is Acacias for All, a project that was born to fight desertification, poverty and gender inequality in rural Tunisia. We fund the project through carbon offsets, and in turn work to plant over 10 000 acacias – trees that are especially good at fighting desertification – to restore the ecosystem and create a strong network of artisans and community leaders who work co-operatively to craft fair trade products made with local resources. Eighty percent of Tunisia’s land is at risk, which means that if we do nothing, eighty percent of Tunisia could become a desert by 2020. This has obvious impacts on the environment_­, but also on the economy, because people rely on farming to make a living, and on social justice, women and youth are typically the first one to be hit by a crisis. Acacias for All is a way to holistically address these interconnected issues.

Acacias for All is Sarah Toumi’s most recent project in Tunisia

EC: Why is it important to keep a youth perspective when advancing social innovation/entrepreneurship?
ST: Today’s youth are living a global crisis. They were born in it and they are fed up with it. I think that's why more and more social innovators are taking matters into their own hands. Young innovators are not doing so to get rich or powerful – they are one of the largest demographic in the world, certainly one of the most vulnerable, yet they have very little representation. That's why we need to integrate more of their leadership and vision if we want social innovation to show us a way out of this crisis.

EC: You have recently completed a graduate degree at La Sorbonne, with a thesis on female adventurers of the 19th century. Do you see any parallels between these female explorers and young female entrepreneurs like you?
ST: Yes, female adventurers of the 19th century were pioneers, much like today’s young female entrepreneurs. They followed their curiosity and passion, no matter the social conventions of the time. They made it possible for more women after them to travel freely, and I like to think that, in a similar way, female entrepreneurs are now making it easier for any woman to create a business, especially a social business, and to explore solutions for a more equitable future.  

EC: What excites you the most about the future? 
ST: I'm excited by the idea that I don't know where I will be or what I will do, knowing at the same time that I will be working on projects that address social injustice no matter where I am. More importantly, I am excited to know that I will not be alone – thousands of young activists out there are joining this movement, and our numbers get bigger by the day.

Follow the DREAM team on Twitter, of visit the Acacias for All project to learn more about Sarah's latest work. 

The post Youth-led innovation: An interview with Sarah Toumi appeared first on Shareable.

Global Innovators is a nine-part series that celebrates the remarkable work of social innovators from outside the English-speaking world. Twice a month we profile the stories of inspiring community pioneers from across three broad cultural clusters: change enthusiasts from Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world. The series, inspired by the multilingual editions of the Enabling City toolkit, focuses on a rich variety of themes that explore 'enabling' frameworks for participatory social change.

Collaborative Cities is a documentary about inspiring entrepreneurs and communities in a new economy built around sharing and collaboration. The documentary features people from vibrant cities across Europe and North America, sharing resources, knowledge, skills, facilities and experiences to reinvent the world we live in. We spoke with Maxime Leroy, Collaborative Cities’ Director, to learn more about the documentary and his experience in the sharing economy.

Enabling City: Prior to directing Collaborative Cities, you were involved in projects like We Are Doers, which you co-founded. Was it a very big jump to go from interaction design to directing an international web documentary?
Maxime Leroy: As a UX/UI design student, now as a service designer, I was interested in projects that tackle social justice, sustainability and local/fair economy issues. I’ve strived to pursue a design practice that doesn’t separate itself from certain political ideology. Christophe Gouache, Manon Dupouy and I started a series of student projects that had this same vision in mind, and this is how We Are Doers came to be.

A few years later, I began directing Collaborative Cities. A year into my service design studies at Parsons, and working as an assistant for the DESIS Lab, I knew design would play a major role in the upcoming ‘collaborative economy/consumption revolution.’ Thanks to eye-opening courses by Cameron Tonkinwise and Lara Penin, I was inspired to gain a better on-the-ground picture of this movement. The success of Collaborative Cities’ crowdfunding campaign enabled me to increase the scope and ambition of this documentary project and to share it with a greater audience.

EC: How was the idea for the Collaborative Cities project born, and how did you become involved with the OuiShare community?
ML: While dreaming up this documentary on my own in NYC, I came across a community of like-minded people in France, which would later from the OuiShare community. Back in Paris, they had a similar project in mind and, with their help, I took the lead on this side of the initiative while they worked on the magazine, events and network in their community. OuiShare helped me identify which initiatives and people we should interview and what cities we should travel to.

EC: What was the creative process behind Creative Cities like? Did you travel to every location and interview these changemakers personally?
ML: I traveled to every city, sometimes alone, sometimes with the Adesias studio’s team to shoot initiatives and startups in the cities we had identified prior to our crowdfunding campaign. Working with this wonderful Paris-based studio helped me transform Collaborative Cities videos into professional content.

EC: What is one crazy story or favourite memory from your experience filming Collaborative Cities?
ML: I lost a freelance videomaker two days after arriving in the US, so I had to learn a new skill (how to shoot with a 5D DSLR and record sound to get great interviews) in just a few hours, before being left with the gear for one month and six cities in North America to visit. One of my favourite experiences was visiting Detroit, but you have to be there to understand it.

EC: Now that you have such incredible exposure to the way people collaborate around the world, have you noticed any major similarities or differences in the way the sharing economy is advancing in places like North America and Europe?
ML: The super-subjective comparison (despite the incredible exposure) goes something like this: North America is definitely faster at spreading the benefits of the new economy to the larger, mainstream audience it deserves. It is also better at scaling it through state-of-the-art online platforms and peer-to-peer tools, having turned some existing powerful ecosystems (Silicon Valley, New York's creative base, Toronto's start-up scene, Detroit’s urban activists) into collaborative economy leaders and advocates.

At the same time, I fear there is a huge confusion going on, mostly due to the marketing forces at play, when it comes to the words "share" and "collaborative.” I don't understand how so many companies can find themselves listed alongside food co-ops, clothes swapping events, and so forth. I just don't get how this confusion can go on with little critical commentary.

In Europe, on the other hand, we have 27 countries in the Union, which means 27 distinct approaches to accelerating the reach of the collaborative economy. The fragmentation decreases the efficiency and overall appeal of practices like home-swapping and car-sharing, which means that we haven’t reached our critical mass yet. That's why we are still at the stage where the press is focusing on angles like: "Hey, look at what these contemporary hippies are doing to recover from the crisis.”

EC: What is in store for Collaborative Cities and you personally?
ML: Now that all Collaborative Cities videos have been released under a Creative Commons license, and after two official premieres in New York and Paris, I am comfortable concluding the project here. I believe in projects with a clear start, end, and a tangible output – that's what motivates me to get back on the road again, to learn from past experiences.

I don't see Collaborative Cities running permanently, but I'm sure somebody will take the project to another level, in another part of the world maybe, and continue to identify and spread the word about great collaborative models worldwide.

As for me, I'm done being behind the camera for the next while, but this documentary has inspired me a great deal to start a new project with my former colleague and current flatmate, Solène Maitre.

To follow Maxime and learn more about what he’s up to, follow him on Twitter or find him online.  

The post Collaborative Cites: an interview with Maxime Leroy appeared first on Shareable.

Global Innovators is a 10-part series that celebrates the remarkable work of social innovators from outside the English-speaking world. Twice a month we profile the stories of inspiring community pioneers from across three broad cultural clusters: change enthusiasts from Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world. The series, inspired by the multilingual editions of the Enabling City toolkit, focuses on a rich variety of themes that explore 'enabling' frameworks for participatory social change.

Located near Tours, in France’s Loire Valley region, pOlau-pole des urban arts urbains was established in 2007 after a collaboration between the French Ministry of Culture and Maud Le Floc'h, pOlau’s current artistic director. Blending the worlds of artistic intervention and planning, for the past five years the organization has been weaving a culture of ‘public space creation’ into the urban fabric with its artist residences, street art performances, critical urban studies and knowledge exchange programs. We spoke with Pascal Ferren, pOlau’s project manager, to learn more about what drives pOlau’s approach to creative urban innovation.

Enabling City: In 2002, the group that is now known as pOlau moved into an industrial space located in the town of Saint-Pierre-des-Corps and transformed a 1,500m²warehouse into a space for artistic creation. What inspired pOlau to invest in a smaller city like Tours as opposed to other major French hubs like Paris?

Pascal Ferren: We share the place with Compagnie Off, a beloved French troupe that wanders the cities of the world to share its street art with the public. Our respective activities require a lot of space, and that is how this industrial site came to make such a superb home for us. The reason we are based in Saint-Pierre-des-Corps is because those working at pOlau are from the Tours region themselves and staying put was an intentional choice. Tours may be smaller than Paris, but the nearby area is home to more than 400,000 people, which is actually fairly representative of the average urban economy in the EU. These days we do quite a bit of work in Paris (the high speed train takes us there in an hour, which is less than the average daily commute for most Parisians!) but contrary to what is often thought abroad we are not really a centralized country, so our presence here matters.

EC: Fast-forward to today and arts-based approaches to city-making seem to be more popular than ever. How is pOlau exploring urban sustainability through the arts? 

PF: People at pOlau are inspired by city fairs and large-scale artistic endeavors; we study them to understand how the city can devour less space, less energy, become less “paralyzed.” Expanding on the concept, we think of ‘fairs’ as sites of dialogue, learning spaces for skill-sharing and upcycling, togetherness and self-expression. It’s through these changing, ‘malleable’ approaches that we begin to explore how urban art facilitates the emergence of an adaptable, frugal, local economy.

EC: pOlau projects are always very unique, what is the inspiration behind the creation of a new project?

PF: Our projects are bound by a desire to do right by the city and stay true to our artistic roots, which is why the two are often hybridized in our work. We produce artistic events that inform the urban sphere in ways that can shape it, (re)name it, acknowledge and revitalize it. At the same time, we anchor our interventions in those very issues that influence the community they are found in. We work with all types of artists who are interested in the urban fabric, and across platforms like street theater, architecture, contemporary art and more. Our installations are often collaborations with local authorities, developers, residents or universities. For this reason, we design or commission projects in ways that harness the different energies that are found in each place.

EC: What is the definition of "art-topia" often mentioned by pOlau in its projects?

PF: The word is a hybrid between art and topos ("place" in Greek). An art-topia is an open place where value-driven creativity – the very same that fuels innovation – can be expressed and enabled. In essence, art-topia is the study and understanding of intermediate places and the process of creation they unleash. As I am sure you have guessed by now, we do not believe in creating in an abstract void, uprooted away from the land. We believe in being anchored in place, and these places are the art-topias.

EC: What are some of your favorite projects from the pOlau catalogue?

PF: The first has to be Jour inondable, an arts-based simulation of the flooding of the city of Tours. For this project we approached La folie kilomètre, a local arts collective, to work on this sensitive issue with us to both investigate and educate about flooding. Their response was to create an urban 24/7 expedition around the area of the imagined flood. I like the project because for two days in 2012 we were able to re-think issues of land use – so often out of reach for the ‘non-experts’ –while creating an exciting and unexpected art project at the same time.

Another favorite is the work of Nicolas Simarik, an artist we’ve been following for the past three years. Nicolas is a sculptor who has relocated to a priority neighbourhood in the city of Tours to co-develop a series of installations that speak to the spirit of the area. Public spaces are highly political places, which means their development is also political. The quality of urban life depends largely on the ability of these spaces to create dialogue, to encourage us to debate our differences and to slow down. It is no coincidence that the idea of ​​democracy comes from the public square, the inclusive and welcoming Greek agora.

EC: Outside of France, pOlau has been working with artists from many corners of the world. How has this experience been for you?

PF: Yes! pOlau has been invited in countries like Ecuador, Spain, and Italy, and we often bring foreign teams and European artists to Tours. This kind of intercultural opening is crucial because we want to stay up to date with what is being done elsewhere. It actually helps us understand what we do here in Tours better! I am proud to be around so much enthusiasm, and to have the opportunity to inspire people to take an interest in their land… And I’m especially proud to do so by helping them reclaim the meaning of place away from individualistic and abstract interests like financial income or political ambition.

EC: Is pOlau’s work well- received in France?

PF: Innovation is always difficult. We are at the intersection of multiple worlds because we activate foreign or downright inexistent domains that are hard to place inside a box. This hybrid position is what really characterizes pOlau, but it makes for a very complicated everyday! Like many bold artists around us, we must constantly explain what we do, why we do it, how it all makes sense…

If it’s true that the conversation about the role of the arts in urban development seems stronger and louder than ever, I find that the actual implementation of arts-based projects remains quite marginal. There seems to be a huge gap between what is defended in public discourse and the effective realization of an idea in the real economy. This space is where innovation can happen. And it is where we stand. It is an unstable, uncomfortable place to be, but it is very exciting.

Find pOlau on Twitter or check out their full catalogue of projects, including more photos of 2012’s Jour Inondable here.

The post The Art of City-Making: An Interview with Pascal Ferren appeared first on Shareable.

Global Innovators is a nine-part series that celebrates the remarkable work of social innovators from outside the English-speaking world. Twice a month we profile the stories of inspiring community pioneers from across three broad cultural clusters: change enthusiasts from Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world. The series, inspired by the multilingual editions of the Enabling City toolkit, focuses on a rich variety of themes that explore 'enabling' frameworks for participatory social change.

From CityCamps to crowdsourcing, Manuel Portela has worked across Latin America to help cities tap into one of their greatest resources: curious, connected, capable citizens. As an interaction designer and an event coordinator, Manuel works to develop platforms that help people come together and explore their creative side.  We spoke to him today about collective brainstorming, community-building and the power of 10,000 ideas. 

Enabling City: Like others in our series, you are a designer by training. How did you become involved in the world of crowdsourcing, CityCamps and social innovation? 
Manuel Portela: I was studying graphic design at Buenos Aires University while building my programming skills on the side. Because of this, I was approached to lend a hand on a few research projects related to urban planning and social innovation.  At the time, I was also working as a freelance event producer and learned a great deal about how meeting spaces can generate unique interactions. Today, I'm interested in the city as interface so I use a design-based approach to bring citizens and institutions together.

EC: One of your projects, 10.000 ideas, is a crowdsourcing platform to re-think urban livability in Latin America. What was the inspiration behind it? 
MP: My early design projects led led to an interest in the development of participatory maps and digital interfaces. One day, I came across New York’s ChangeByUs campaign and thought it was very impressive, though I found the conversation to be flowing mostly in one direction: there were ideas for one city directed to and curated by one administration. This inspired me to develop a similar platform, this time open to all of Latin America. In essence, 10.000 ideas is a repository of suggestions and solutions that anyone – whether in the public, private or civil sector – can share and implemenet with others. I hope to see more and more places for this kind of problem-solving ‘offline’ but, in the meantime, we can make the most of what the web has to offer.

EC: You're also the founder of CityCamp Buenos Aires and Chiripa-City Starters. How do you see these initiatives contributing to the democratization of participation in cities? 
MP:  Physical spaces are essential to effective participation, and CityCamp was the first event developed to stimulate fresh thinking for and about cities. The event is an international format with its own brand and history where participants share project ideas, brainstorm solutions, and test them together.  In 2012, I helped bring a CityCamp in Buenos Aires and later inSantiago, and there will be more cities participating this year.

CHIRIPA, on the other hand, is an umbrella organization for my work. It stands for ‘serendipity’, which is a principle behind everything I do. It was founded last year as an 'urban lab'  for local initiatives and has now grown into a full-fledged consulting firm. We mostly work with local governments to ‘open up’ urban management and decision-making. We prioritize collaborative projects where we act as facilitators, but we also provide expertise in design, programming, event production, and academic research. Two of our major projects focus on sustainable development and creative communities, and we are working with the Ministry of Modernization on a new SmartCity Index to develop tools that encourage citizen participation.

As a citizen, I believe we need more spaces to think about the cities we live in in an inclusive and hands-on fashion. The two initiatives help me work on this in a well-rounded way – with communities and government.

EC: How is working in Buenos Aires and Santiago? 
MP: The cities are very different and have been through very stark transitions. Buenos Aires suffers from a serious transportation problem; the economic crisis is embedded in the very fabric of the city. The community of urban enthusiasts is small, the concern for the development of the city is very recent, and there is almost no appreciation for urban issues. Much remains to be built here, in the cultural sense more than anything else. We have to work to prove that being an active citizen is important.

Santiago is totally different. It has grown significantly in the past five years because it is in booming growth. People have been taking an interest in decision-making in part due to a widespread re-hauling of the transportation system that has gone pretty badly. As a result, there is a growing concern for urban planning and public policy, and an active community of people involved in these issues. It is in Santiago that I got the idea for 10.000 ideas, thanks also to the inspiration provided by websites like Plataforma Urbana.

EC: With experiences both online and offline, what is your favorite approach to community building?
MP: I like toolkits like Enabling City, Streetplan’s Tactical Urbanism or The Placemaker's Guide for their ideas on how to create spaces for change. As a designer, I am also passionate about the process itself so I rely on design thinking and toolkits like IDEO’s Human Centered Design. I am a very methodical person and I like to outline and diagram my way through things –I'm not very good with chaos! In the end, no matter the tools, I think the real secret is investing in the generation of social capital. That and being intentionally pro-commons, because it is that that helps us rethink the relationship between cities and citizens. Today more than ever, public spaces are coming under attack so it is important to find new places for community creation, places where we can safeguard the common good.

In this sense, the Internet can be useful in transcending boundaries – virtual and physical alike. It is no coincidence that successful networks are relevant in both realms. I’ve always been an advocate for thinking about the city outside of the box, thinking beyond its jurisdictional boundaries.  I interact daily with virtual networks that help grow my local initiatives and this is important because being surrounded by people with no vision can easily degenerate into an alienating feeling that “it’s not worth it,” or that “nothing makes sense.” Crossing paths with people working on progressive projects, on the other hand, can be very motivating.

Everybody wants to live better, but not everyone works on it. Community-building can be a powerful way to dream up tools and share knowledge in support of an empowered, creative citizenry.

Follow Manuel on Twitter, or find him online here.

The post The City As Interface: An Interview With Manuel Portela appeared first on Shareable.

Global Innovators is a 10-part series that celebrates the remarkable work of social innovators from outside the English-speaking world. Twice a month we profile the stories of inspiring community pioneers from across three broad cultural clusters: change enthusiasts from Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world. The series, inspired by the multilingual editions of the Enabling City toolkit, focuses on a rich variety of themes that explore 'enabling' frameworks for participatory social change.

Tactical urbanism. Urbanismo tàctico. Urbanisme tactique. The term is the same in many languages, but the way the practice translates on the ground is just as diverse as the people (and the places) behind it. Javier Vergara Petrescu is a seasoned ‘translator’ whose projects have been inspiring citizens and practitioners both at home and abroad. As the founder of Ciudad Emergente, he has worked in three continents to improve the quality of urban life through creative community involvement. We spoke to him today to learn more about his current projects, his travels, and what brought him back to Chile to experiment with tactical urbanism. 

Enabling City: You have studied in London, lived in New York, worked in Germany and Brazil, and are now back to your native Santiago de Chile. What brings you home?

Javier Vergara Petrescu: I was a Lecturer in Urbanism at the Universidad Católica de Santiago when I was awarded a full scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the London School of Economics. With my MSc in City Design fully funded by the Chilean government, I committed to returning home after my studies to work in the country. Today, more and more young Chileans are studying abroad and are coming home with fresh ideas and a new way of doing things. For Chile this is important because we are a remote country, and this helps us challenge close-mindedness in a very tangible way. I hope this means that the young Chileans absorbing new ideas today will become the progressive decision-makers of tomorrow.

EC: You have been involved with the Tactical Urbanism team in the US for some time and now you are mainstreaming the practice in Chile. Have you noticed any major differences between North and South American approaches to tactical urbanism?

JVP: Yes. It all started in 2011, when I was living in New York. I was starting up Ciudad Emergente and kept meeting a great number of people working on amazing participatory planning projects, people like Mike Lydon of Street Plans Collaborative and Aurash Khawarzad of Change Administration Studio.

But tactical urbanism is not entirely new to Chile. The basic premise – implementing short-term actions to respond to urban challenges –reflects a way of doing things that is deeply rooted in South American culture. Ciudad Emergente simply introduced a new term to capture the spirit of this growing practice and to raise awareness about its transformative potential.

One of the main differences I see between North and South America, though, is the culture of participation. In the North, people are more inclined to have a say in decision-making processes, whereas in the South civic engagement is something that began to flourish after the fall of dictatorships and the emergence of new economic opportunities. It’s only in the past few decades that we have collectively become aware of the importance of civic education. Latin American societies are still influenced by a ‘paternalistic’ approach where disadvantaged people are turned into passive receivers of public support rather than being seen as active agents of change. At the same time, those who are better off tend to embrace individualism and personal success, and don’t quite trust institutions or see them as possible partners. We might already be active on the ‘short-term action’ side of things, but we are missing a long-term vision – and for that you need a confident and empowered citizenry.

EC: You started Ciudad Emergente to work on urban livability and high-impact participatory projects in South America. What are some of the key lessons you have learned along the way?

JVP: What I’ve noticed so far is that, regardless of a community’s overall social capital, people really connect with the “lighter-quicker-cheaper” model. It’s a ‘capacity-building-by-example’ approach that works really well here. I have learned that urbanism isn’t just the domain of urban planners, and that the everyday and the DIY spheres matter, too. Some of the best examples of great public spaces are the ones that are shaped by the people themselves.

EC: You have lived and worked in many countries. What kinds of opportunities for knowledge-sharing have you found between Chile and the rest of the world?

JVP: We are a remote country that has been catching up to the developed world through digital literacy. Chile is ranked 10th in the world for Twitter users and over 80% of Santiago’s population is on Facebook. This means that more and more people are sharing their experiences and coming together at events like Buenos Aires’ CityCamp. That said, we have a long way to go to effectively connect local actors with groups both inside and outside the country!

This is why we have brought the popular Tactical Urbanism Salon format to Chile’s XVIII Architecture Biennale, and why Ciudad Emergente and Street Plans Collaborative have partnered to launch a Latin American version of the Tactical Urbanism toolkit. We will be featuring initiatives from Colombia, Chile, Perú, and Argentina in the hopes of sparking a debate on participatory urbanism from a South American perspective.

EC: You are also the founder of Citisent and a Professor. Is the tactical urbanism model well received by academics?

JVP: Yes. Introducing tactical urbanism into academia has allowed us to go deeper into research and debate. Engaging with that world gives us a chance to tune up our projects with the help of dedicated students, and to organize national and international seminars to get more urban planners familiarized with the model of ‘short-term actions for long-term change.’ Universities can be great partners for that.

EC: What else have you been working on lately?

2013 continues to be an exciting year for Ciudad Emergente!

The Chilean Council of Culture and Arts commissioned a large, pop-up recycling plaza for Valparaiso’s Urban Festival, a city where there is no recycling system or recycling culture. We built a temporary roof structure made out of 12,000 plastic bottles brought to us by the people of Valparaiso. Then we launched a city-wide campaign and partnered with grassroots organizations to install four stations for the collection of PET bottles. The idea was to demonstrate that people are willing to recycle if there is the political support for it. Thanks to the project, we were able to successfully install recycling stations that are now 100% operative!

We are also working on a project called Malòn Urbano, a kind of urban potluck where residents come together to discuss solutions for their neighborhoods. We have four planned in Antofagasta City this year. Because of the mining industry, Antofagasta is the wealthiest city in Chile. It has the GDP of Toronto but performs poorly in areas like education, green spaces, and social capital. Malòn Urban will serve as a tactic for community-building and neighborhood improvement, as well as to develop a set of indicators on subjective wellbeing (such as happiness, life satisfaction, etc.) that will be used to complement data from the OECD. Malòn Urbano is also being used by the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism in Chile as part of a heritage zone master plan at Barrio Yungay in Santiago.

Other projects include an international seminar with Universidad Católica de Santiago  and Monash University to prototype mobility strategies for Santiago; ‘tactically’ extending the bike lane network of the Municipality of Providencia; transforming neglected spaces near shopping malls into areas for urban agriculture… and more! 

I have to say that none of these projects and social initiaves would have been ever achieved without the great work of my partners at Ciudad Emergente. My hope is to share what I have learned from my international practice and to do our part in improving the quality of life in our cities. There is no shortage of ideas or opportunities in South America… This is just the beginning!

Follow Javier on Twitter, or find him online at Ciudad Emergenteand Citisent.

The post Translating Tactical Urbanism: An Interview with Javier Vergara Petrescu appeared first on Shareable.

Global Innovators is a nine-part series that celebrates the remarkable work of social innovators from outside the English-speaking world. Twice a month, we will be profiling the stories of inspiring community pioneers from across three broad cultural clusters: change enthusiasts from Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world. The series, inspired by the multilingual editions of the Enabling City toolkit, will focus on a rich variety of themes that explore 'enabling' frameworks for participatory social change.

“Open” and “participatory” are words that seem to have become almost synonymous with design lately. From open source software to co-creation, the process of collective brainstorming is stronger – and more inspiring – than ever. Yet one element that is often overlooked in the process of collaborative design, one that we don’t maybe think much about, is something essential to the process itself: “open” communication. Cultivating the art of effective communication requires a capacity to listen empathetically, a strong sense of emotional intelligence, an insatiable curiosity and, of course, a willingness to share.

The result is what is often called “collective intelligence,” the skilful blending of diverse insights and ideas into a coherent whole. So just like successful ‘open design’ is helping us make the shift from closed to open systems of production, learning what makes ‘open communication’ successful can help us shift the emphasis away from the celebration of individual insights to a creative process developed for and by the commons. For almost a decade, Cristiano Siri has been working to encourage just that. We spoke with him today to learn more about how he went from being a user experience designer to a participatory process facilitator, and what inspired him to investigate the path towards personal and community resilience along the way.

Enabling City: Cristiano, your work is known for bringing people together and bridging inter-sectoral divides. What are some of the formative experiences that have defined your work over the years?
Cristiano Siri: I first started as a user experience and service designer in Italy, and later decided to train as a participatory process facilitator in Italy and abroad. For the past ten years, I have practiced, taught and disseminated the art of listening, of co-creation, and community-building. These experiences are what compelled me to co-found The Hub Roma and to be a founding member of CoDesign Jam, an event format that organizes regular co-design gatherings (such as the Global Service Jam) here in Rome.

At the moment, however, my main project is finding my true ‘mission’ in life. In May 2013, my backpack and I will set out on a “mission finding” journey to explore places where people are prototyping new ways of living through resilience, relationship-building and inclusive community practices. I am inspired by job titles like: Transition Host, Transformation Doula, Community Gardener and Healer, Global Cross-Pollinator and Resilience Agent. I will visit eco-villages, intentional communities, transition towns and groups who are using different sharing economy models to learn from their stories and see how I can use the values of active listening in support of resilience-building.

EC: What motivated you to make the jump from being a user experience designer to becoming involved in co-design, co-working and the world of social innovation?
CS: I entered the “working world” fresh out of school and quickly realized that the workplace culture was encouraging us to pursue our tasks individually, that we were being separated into silos. Even in a creative environment, the value of listening to one another was missing. I wanted to do something to create a culture shift, to encourage the cross-pollination of skills, experiences and viewpoints so that they, in turn, could be applied to the emergence of eco-logical solutions. I found these engrained work habits to be stifling opportunities for co-working, so I created workshops to introduce co-design to as many stakeholders and team members as I possibly could. What emerged was an experience of deep engagement, one that gave way to new forms of collaboration and communication.

Then, in 2009, I met Dario Carrera and Ivan Fadini who invited me to join their team and open The Hub Roma with them. This was my first encounter with social innovation. Through my involvement with the project, I realized that the skills I had developed could be wonderfully employed to support a community of social innovators, people who are working to substitute negative externalities with long-term, positive ones.

EC: That must have been a rewarding, if challenging, transition. What have you learned from working with social innovators in Italy?
CS: In Italy, we are currently hearing the loud crackling sounds of a collapsing social, cultural and economic system. A large number of citizens are suffering from this collapse but, to this day, the institutions and the entrepreneurial system have failed to provide any tangible solutions to move the country forward. Luckily, citizens are leading the way by self-organizing and prototyping change through innovative social practices, showing us that change is indeed possible.

The practice of ‘social innovation’ is still new in the country, but I believe the strength of this community is precisely its ability to offer tangible, new ways to address old (but very real) needs. There is no support from formal institutions, and much remains to be done to network these co-design initiatives more broadly. The Hub Roma was established for precisely this purpose: to offer spaces and events that encourage encounters and networking while providing visibility to social innovators. We also use the space to explore relevant and common themes through public workshops, like our recent event series called "Money 4 Good" where we explored alternatives to the current financial model.

EC:As a seasoned facilitator, what are some of your favourite ways of bringing people together?
CS: To create positive change, I like to invite all stakeholders into the same room to facilitate the emergence of a shared view of the system they are in. This experience enables a shift in the participants' ways of thinking and acting so that, together, we begin to co-create and prototype solutions that have the collective long-term interest in mind. To do this, I use principles, methods, and tools from the Art of Hosting, Theory U, and Appreciative Inquiry. This is my favourite process design sequence:

1. Listening practices (eg. Council Circle, Sensing Journeys, Open Space);
2. Practices to collectively envision the system (eg. World Café, Multi Stakeholder Change Lab);
3. Co-design and co-creation practices (eg. Design Jam);
4. Prototyping practices.

EC: When blending these approaches, what are the values that guide your ‘open communication’ work?
CS: I will let my guiding values emerge from four quotes that I love:

Every leader is continually making an invitation, but often they are unaware of the invitation they are making. Some leadership is an invitation to shut up and some leadership is an invitation to speak up.  We focus on the invitation it takes to get people to a conversation where they are willing to participate as fully as they can.

Mary Alice Arthur – Art of Hosting Steward

Not just any talk is conversation. Not any talk raises consciousness. Good conversation has an edge. It opens your eyes to something, it quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates. It keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. The reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness. Your mind has been moved. You are at another level with your reflections.

James Hillman

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Victor Frankl

And those who where seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

Friedrich Nietsche

EC: You mentioned the importance of bringing communities together and creating a system of mutual support. How can we encourage ‘networked’ co-design to thrive?
CS: To empower the emergence of a global community of change makers, I first like to focus on developing a process that supports, at the local level, the:

• Visibility of innovative local experiments and prototypes;
• Sharing of experiences (both successes and failures);
• Wisdom and capacity to adapt models to different contexts;
• Ability to listen to emerging signals, even when they are weak and local, to predict global changes in advance;
• Capacity for dialogue, and
• Connections that can be fostered between local initiatives and global institutional reform.

This dynamic is already developing and accelerating and I believe the most important factor, today, is that social innovators are aware they are no longer alone, that there is a multitude of them changing the rules of the game and giving birth to a new paradigm.

The rest will depend on how well we respond to the signals we hear when we actively listen to the world around us.

Find Cristiano on Twitter, or read his blog here. You can read more about The Hub Roma here, or visit the CoDesign Jam page to learn about upcoming events in Rome.

The post Networked Co-Design: An Interview with Cristiano Siri appeared first on Shareable.

Global Innovators is a nine-part series that celebrates the remarkable work of social innovators from outside the English-speaking world. Twice a month, we will be profiling the stories of inspiring community pioneers from across three broad cultural clusters: change enthusiasts from Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world. The series, inspired by the  multilingual editions of the Enabling City toolkit, will focus on a rich variety of themes that explore 'enabling' frameworks for participatory social change.

For over two decades, Rome’s FORUM PA  has been experimenting with novel forms of engagement in Italy and beyond. Through its annual Expo, the organization encourages public administrators and citizens alike to discover what community empowerment, the Web 2.0, and sharing have to do with social innovation. The event, once a gathering for  ‘policy wonks’ and administrators, now captivates the interest of hundreds in what has become Italy’s leading space to re-imagine governance and rethink collaboration. We spoke with Gianni Dominici, Forum PA’s General Director, about the organization’s mission and his thoughts on the future of participation in cities.

Enabling City: Gianni, your governance experience ranges from the EU-level to the grassroots. Can you tell us a little about yourself and what kindles your interest in participatory processes?
Gianni Dominici: Prior to my involvement with Forum PA, I coordinated national and international projects for major Italian research institutes. As a social scientist, my work was driven by a passion for ICTs and the desire to continually explore the ways they intersect with civic participation. When I arrived at Forum PA, this passion quickly turned into an ongoing commitment to help Italy make the switch from talking about  ‘public administration reform’ to embracing open governance. Today, I think this commitment is best exemplified by our work on smart cities. We are working on the development of a framework that makes active citizenship part of the new ‘Italian way.’ It is truly participatory work that relies on the involvement of the public sector, of civil society and of businesses in making public value creation and knowledge-sharing part of the process of institutional redesign.

EC: Forum PA has been at the forefront of the administration-citizen conversation for years, experimenting with new formats and tools that bring people together and disseminate best practices. How did the organization transition from being a policy think tank with a focus on institutional communication to Italy’s leading voice in open governance?
GD: We have been around for over two decades, but it didn’t take us long to realize that the current governance framework isn’t working. The traditional way of doing things – the hierarchical, bureaucratic and controlling “public machine” – is useless in the face of emerging social challenges and complex economic issues. This realization was the impetus for us to conduct research and learn from those who have been prototyping new forms of engagement around the world. We took inspiration from the Governing by Network model developed by Goldsmith and Eggers, as well as President Obama’s Open Government Initiative, to name only a few. These are programs that have rapidly spread to Europe and that, to us, represent complementary visions of a bold new evolution towards open governance. Having said that, we believe that social innovation is no longer just ‘a choice’ – it is something that must be embedded into a whole new way of understanding governance across all levels. The principles and practices of co-design and co-working, when applied to the notion of active citizenship and public value, are indeed the very essence of the (r)evolution we are working towards. We have to move past the mantra of ‘efficiency and effectiveness’ that has traditionally driven public management objectives to a much more holistic understanding of democracy itself. To me, this is where social innovation comes in to bridge the gap between top-down and bottom-up, and where I see Forum PA playing a role.

EC: Italy is a country that has, until now, been largely absent from the social innovation and open governance conversation. Can you tell us more about the national landscape and the opportunities (and obstacles) present there?
GD: The context, both nationally and in Rome, is quite unique indeed. Geographically speaking, we have the good fortune of being located in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, to have witnessed the birth of many a civilization over the course of the centuries. At the same time, we are a fragmented country. The urban landscape is punctured by small-to-mid-sized cities with their own unique problems, making mobility a complex issue and putting pressure on our land use and resource conservation needs. As a country, we have to work harder at making environmental stewardship a part of our daily concerns, and this includes a renewed interest in the commons, the re-discovery of horizontal and non-mediated relationships, and an appreciation for crowdsourcing and co-creation.

That said, many of Italy’s cities, particularly the bigger ones like Rome, are becoming hubs of civic innovation. These are the places where sharing is tested daily, where figuring out how to live together – and live together well – is more important than ever. Today, cities like Rome are home to countless bottom-up, citizen-driven initiatives. A lot of the landscape is made up of micro-communities where the seeds of social change are planted daily. Moms are becoming community catalysts by taking over neglected green spaces and running them so that their children can learn about urban agriculture; school yards are coming to life with the help of kids and parents meeting after school; and volunteers are ‘adopting’ public squares to create lively spaces for community living. These experiences are all based on a new idea of public space, a re-interpretation of urban design that blends a desire for shared living with contagious experiments in social incrementalism. And there is momentum at the mid-level, too. The Hub recently opened its doors in Rome and their presence has been facilitating all kinds of conversations between citizens and institutions. To celebrate this momentum, Forum PA has partnered with The Hub to organize an Active Citizenship Day, which will take place at Forum PA's upcoming Expo on May 30th, 2013.

EC: What are some of Forum PA’s other ways of bringing people together and creating change? 
GD: When it comes to civic engagement, I believe we have to target citizens who are willing to be active but somehow cannot, and those who can but are not willing to. Aside from our two big annual events, one of our most recent projects has been the launch of Smart Innovation, a web-magazine that explores exciting developments in social innovation, smart cities and open governance in accessible and dynamic ways.

As I was mentioning, there is a lot of momentum in the country and this calls for a critical awareness of the risks that come with the mainstreaming of participation. We need to ensure that the growing calls for crowdsourcing and collaboration do not turn into a complete devolution of programs and services on “good willing” citizens and neighbourhoods groups. Citizens should not become a substitute for institutions. At Forum PA, we are working on a project to turn Rome into an urban innovation lab where participation is a big driver of change and inclusion, but where institutions are taught how to share their power and rethink their role in more balanced and fair ways.

Lastly, we took inspiration from Gavin Newsom’s Citizenville and are looking into gamification and how it might be applied to cities. Gamification could be a powerful tool to get ‘those who can but won’t’ engaged in community life. Newsome hopes ‘innobucks’ (civic money) could become the Angry Birds of civic democracy, and we think that’s something worth exploring. We are working with community organizations and citizens on a project that we’ll be launching soon, so watch out for that!

To read more about Forum PA, check out their Smart Innovation magazine (in Italian), or follow them on Twitter. Their international Smart Cities Expo will be taking place in Bologna, Italy on October 16-18^th, 2013.

The post Innovations in Governance: An Interview with Gianni Dominici appeared first on Shareable.

Global Innovators is a nine-part intercultural series that celebrates the remarkable work of social innovators from outside the English-speaking world. Twice a month, we will be profiling inspiring grassroots leaders from across three broad cultural clusters: change enthusiasts from Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world. The series, inspired by the multilingual editions of the Enabling City toolkit, will focus on a rich variety of themes that explore 'enabling' frameworks for participatory social change.

This week's first interviewee is Rome's Filippo Bozotti of Tribewanted.

Enabling City: Filippo, your background is truly international. Tell us a little about yourself.
Filippo Bozotti: I am Italian-born but have lived all over the world: I grew up in France and Switzerland, went to school in Boston and lived in New York for seven years, where I was a documentary filmmaker. In 2010, I moved to Sierra Leone to start Tribewanted's second sustainable community in John Obey Beach and have just recently moved back to Italy to start our third Tribewanted community in Monestevole, Umbria.

EC: Can you tell us more about Tribewanted and how it works?
FB: Tribewanted is an online community of likeminded people who adopt, develop and create sustainable communities “offline”. Our goal is to establish long-term financial benefits to the communities we work with through the development of a cooperatively owned eco-tourism facility. For the last six years, on an island in Fiji, a beach in Sierra Leone, and now in the Umbrian hills of Italy, we have been working in partnership with villages (and 1500+ visiting tribe-members!) to develop eco-tourism destinations from the ground-up. Along the way, we’ve generated $1.5m in revenues, re-invested into the local villages and created over 50 jobs. Now we're working on a campaign to crowdfund a network of sustainable communities around the world and to expand our co-op model with the input of our member-supporters.

EC: How did you become involved in the world of sustainable design and social innovation?
FB: A few years ago, I created a documentary called Bling for MTV. The story explored the links between blood diamonds in Sierra Leone and hip hop music in the United States. Through that project I was able to bring several famous rappers to Sierra Leone and show them where their diamonds were coming from. Bling was quite successful, so we started a non-profit in Sierra Leone with a focus on micro-finance. The more time we spent there, the more we saw the opportunity for eco-tourism as a means to tell a positive story about the country. Most people know Sierra Leone for its blood diamonds and civil war, but the country has been at peace for years now and has been untouched as far as eco-tourism is concerned. The landscape consists of lush forests and gorgeous beaches, so Ben Keene, Tribewanted's co-founder, and I partnered up to develop the second Tribewanted community there. Fast-forward to today, and we're now in the process of opening our third community in Monestevole, Italy!

EC: You are originally from Italy, a country with a rich history and unique challenges. How is the social innovation community in Rome, your city? What are some of the challenges that people face there?
FB: Based on my experiences with Tribewanted, which so far have focused on building eco-tourism communities in developing countries, Rome and Italy present very different challenges. If, in my previous experience, some of the biggest issues revolved around the social need for education and healthcare, here one of the biggest needs is protecting local and artisanal traditions and finding a way to marry the old – our heritage – with the new. I interpret this as mainly the need to promote sustainable farming practices, permaculture, green architecture and green energy. I find that in Italy there is an obsession with concrete, and that is something we have to change. We need to scale our best practices nation-wide and get serious about reducing our carbon footprint.

In Monestevole, we were fortunate because the village already has a strong community. Everyone works together, shares amazing food, makes wine and oil, the hens are all free-range and we don't use pesticides. We have a lot to learn from those who have been living this way for generations. What Tribewanted was happy to contribute was an investment in turning all of this into an even more sustainable community – with renewable energy, innovative water recycling and permaculture.

EC: What are some of your favourite tools for bringing people together and creating change?

FB: I like urban gardens for their immediacy. They are a great way to bring people together; you get your hands dirty, take a break from personal electronics, and the initial investment they require is not as onerous as, say, solar panels or wind turbines. I think renewable energy and sustainable transportation are also quite useful in providing people with a visual – a tangible sign of our transition to a lower carbon footprint. Being involved in urban agriculture or sustainable architecture is an empowering way of getting people to participate. Same thing with the sharing economy. Bike-sharing, car-sharing… these are not one-time solutions, they are the combination of hundreds of similar steps taken in support of the same path. The reason a community forms around them, I think, is the way they change us and the opportunity they give us to affect change in our everyday lives. It's the combination of personal empowerment and the joy of finding a community that has us coming back for more. And what I think we've learned along the way is that we don't need to wait for catastrophe to bring us closer. Community can be just as powerful in our day-to-day.

EC: What are the values that inspire and guide your work?
FB: Sustainability is a big one for me. In some ways, though, it's a selfish way to be involved. I'm working to realize the life that I want to live, and the Tribewanted community model is how I want to live. We’re working hard to build sustainable communities in the world and setting high standards in the hope that we'll succeed, but even if we have to settle halfway the truth is that I don’t want a nine-to-five job, I don’t want to live in a city anymore. I’ve done that, it was a great experience, but I’ve moved on. Now I'm interested in getting as close as possible to the life I want to live – and Tribewanted is a great way for me to test my dreams and put them into action. Of course I still struggle with the tensions: we're an online community of thousands of people so even here in the rolling hills of Umbria I spend way too much time staring at my laptop instead of being in the fields. But if I keep at it, if we all do, then it's not really “work.” And we'll have hopefully achieved something meaningful along the way.

Thank you, Filippo!

Read more about Filippo and Tribewanted's story here. And stay tuned for the next articles in the series.

The post Intentional Eco-Communities: An Interview with Filippo Bozotti appeared first on Shareable.