Design Principles for Developing Open Source Urbanism

In Open Source Urbanism (OSU) citizens self-organize and create Do-It-Yourself (DIY) urban designs to address societal problems. Self-organized citizens develop these designs, but there is no support for the design process based on the co-creation and involvement of citizens. The latter are mainly non-experts. Three aspects characterize OSU: ...

Unleashing or domesticating the vitality of citizens' initiatives? The paradoxical relationship between governments and citizens' initiatives in the energy transition

In their quest to create vital cities, West European city governments stimulate citizens to self-organize in citizens' initiatives. This trend it accompanied by conflicting scientific and governmental discourses: on the one hand, citizens' initiatives are praised for giving ‘power to the people’, on the other hand, citizens' initiatives are...

Growing the Movement: Supporting citizens in joining the bottom-up participation landscape

Through bottom-up initiatives citizens have the ability to adapt their environment to their own desires and ideas. It is a way to take power and create a city that is truly based on what the residents want, rather than it being opposed on them. <br/><br/>Right now there is a growing movement in the Netherlands where municipalities want to...

Renewable Energy Communities as a New Actor in Home Energy Savings

Renewable energy communities (RECs) might be an interesting new stakeholder in stimulating home energy‐saving efforts by tenants and homeowners due to their potential of raising awareness locally and gaining public support for low‐carbon energy and energy‐savings projects, because RECs are often locally sited, in close social proximity of...

The power of stories: A framework to orchestrate reflection in urban storytelling to form stronger communities

This paper focuses on the particular power of storytelling to foster reflection and connections between people in urban life. In fact, the core principles and mechanisms for public storytelling to achieve this have yet to be made explicit. This gap is addressed by introducing a novel reflective storytelling framework that unveils the underlying...

Blik op Buurt: Story-finding of neighborhood problems using local perspectives with data

Many active citizens that work on improving their neighborhoods have in-depth local knowledge (small data), but are oftentimes not directly involved in the decision-making processes of city officials. A top-down push is witnessed to make smart use of open data for the development of social solutions and services. However, this creates a gap for...

Supporting citizen initiatives: The design of a platform for the neighbourhood budget of the Frederik Hendrikbuurt

This master thesis is the report of the graduation project ‘Supporting citizen initiatives - the design of a platform for the neighbourhood budget of the Frederik Hendrikbuurt’ for the municipality of Amsterdam and more specifically the municipal participation innovation team OpenStadsdeel. The report describes the design of a platform that aims...