Description

Participation in practical everyday activities transforms peoples lives and the neighbourhoods in which they live. Participatory City amplifies the scale of these activities; grows new projects, and builds support platforms. This Illustrated Guide is an introduction into how Participatory City is intended to work, as well as describing it’s potential to impact on many serious interconnected social problems. It is based on the research documented in the report ‘Designed to Scale - Mass participation to build resilient neighbourhoods’, and more detail can be obtained in that publication. The key finding of this work has been that increasing participation in practical everyday activities to high levels could help to transform people’s lives and the neighbourhoods in which those people live. While this new type of ‘participation culture’ remains unsupported, small scale and fragmented, it will continue to be only an optimistic flickering of a brighter future, without fully realising it’s potential to be a key building block for building sustainable cities of the future. Participatory City will be working in neighbourhoods to achieve the necessary scale, creating strong support systems that encourage people to test ideas and grow new projects. Over time these projects will develop into a dense network of participation opportunities that will generate many benefits for people and their families directly, and for the neighbourhood as a whole.

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