Participatory City Making: Tool Directions
The Participatory City Making project (2016-2019) created frameworks, directions, prototypes and tools for stakeholders to actively engage in exploring collaborative potentials, defining their roles in city making processes. This article shares tool directions.
These 9 tool directions were drawn up to inspire actual tool development. They give insights into possible opportunities for tools to improve participation between the local government and citizen’s initiatives. Each direction is supported by quotes from stakeholders in the field coming from our research. Also, for each direction it is explained ‘what a tool could be’, ‘why people would need the tool’, ‘what it will change’, and ‘what it can develop towards in the future’.
For the Rotterdam system a figure is added to explain where, or in which areas there is an opportunity to improve participation with the imagined tool direction. The ‘Gemeente Rotterdam’ is the local city council where rules and policy is made; the elected citizens are the members of the ‘Gebieds commissie’ in each area (gebied); the civil servants are the ones active in executing policy’ the individual citizens are the citizens of Rotterdam, organised and non-organised into initiatives. The feedback on this model has been dual: positive because of a need of clarification of the structures in the city, but also less positive because it makes too much of a divide pictured between local municipality and citizens. This is not the image we want to picture, because it is the participation of the combined energy of citizens and government that should to the trick.
