Most people who have not taken a specific interest in the commons have likely come into contact with them through public spaces in a city, urban gardening plots, and of course Wikipedia. Although most of us don’t necessarily realise that’s what they are and don’t spend much time considering what that implies. Breathable air is another form of commons we’ve grown more aware of with pollution and of course COVID and protecting that shared air by using masks.
As a growing number of people realise, climate change isn’t just about large-scale, somewhat slow change; it’s also about more frequent and more extreme “weather events,” like “hundred-year storms” happening two or three times in 15 years, for example.
This past Tuesday, we had a post about the city of Helsinki’s project to enable participatory budgeting with a card game. Both the budgeting aspect itself, and the card game, could be loosely grouped under the concept of “civic design.” To go a bit further on that, this short article by the team at Local Peoples can give us some useful pointers and closes with an overview of a framework.
Participatory budgeting has been a “thing” in cities for a while now; assigning a small budget to citizens ideas, and giving them some agency in choosing to which projects the money goes to.
This article about Geofencing some vehicles in Sweden is quite short, yet the topic connects to multiple opportunities and challenges. Let’s look at the pilot project first and then at some of those connected issues.
