Smart citizens (3): crowdfunding platforms and the year of collaborative city-making

Excerpted from Dan Hill:

Numerous cities have witnessed an explosion in crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding platforms throughout 2012. Following in the wake of the increasingly high-profile crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, and almost popping up at the rate of one every couple of weeks over the year, these include Neighborland, In Our Backyard (IOBY), YIMBY, SpaceHive, Brickstarter, Neighbor.ly, Change By Us, Give A Minute, Smallknot, Joukkoenkeli, Lucky Ant, Voorderkunst, I Make Rotterdam, as well as several more general crowdfunding services occasionally bent into shape to serve as urban incubators (Indiegogo, PeopleFundIt, PleaseFundUs, Crowdfunder, and Kickstarter itself).

The basic notion is that someone thinks of and pitches a local project, and people in the community “back” that idea, typically donating small amounts of funding. The network effects of social media enable an aggregation, whilst the architecture of contemporary websites enabled the projects to be tracked, discussed, updated, voted upon, and so on. (See Brickstarter.org for a more thorough unpacking of these ideas.)

All these systems are predicated on the idea that citizens want to engage in their city; that implicitly, citizens are best-placed to notice, suggest, aggregate and drive a certain kind of urban intervention. This “Kickstarter urbanism“, like Kickstarter itself, is typically oriented towards the small things in cities—let’s turn this parking lot into a community garden; let’s start a co-working space; let’s start a bike-sharing scheme—rather than taking on urban governance models, or attempting to fund large-scale infrastructure.

This in itself is no criticism: what city wouldn’t benefit if people started caring about the small things? But is there is a lingering sense that this might be a little “bread and circuses”? A stream of micro-distractions to occupy the community while the big boys in government get on with the big stuff—education, transit systems, energy policy, grand civic buildings, and so on.

Of course, the basic model of crowd-funding currently limits the capital it might produce, even for dense neighbourhoods. Kickstarter can generate tens of millions of dollars at best, which is a lot for a watch but doesn’t get near the investment required for a light-rail system, say. And the average Kickstarter project raises under USD10k, on a global platform, often promoting global projects. Most urban projects are intrinsically not global, but highly local, limiting the size of the crowd that might fund, whilst asking the basic question of who decides what is best locally, when using a global platform.

Equally, crowdfunding could have a political edge, consciously or not, in that raising capital directly from particular members of a community could impact upon a municipality’s capability to raise money through taxation. Crowdfunding could inadvertently become a substitution for taxation. If these are public projects—and they tend to be—then why does the municipality not fund them via the public purse?

Besides, money speaks rather loudly in crowdfunding systems. A wealthy local resident could increase the likelihood that a project might happen simply by dropping a million euros on it. Such systems tend to use a financial target as primary organising object, rather than its potential appropriateness, quality or any more thorough assessment of need or desire. There is nothing intrinsically democratic about social media. (Of course, we might argue that this is still an improvement on a situation where only a few large players—developers and governments, primarily—can really promote and progress projects, also through their sheer weight of capital.)

We should not pretend that hitching our decision-making apparatus to crowdfunding is in any way a more “democratic” approach, or that it will necessarily produce more appropriate or beneficial local solutions. Whilst it might increase transparency in urban development, which could lead to increased accountability, this is not necessarily a given. Any system so clearly oriented around simple accretion of financial capital will be easily gamed by those who happen to already possess large wads of said financial capital.

So, it is indeed easier to crowdsource a revolution than a light-rail system. We can generate an Arab Spring, but when a contemporary platform like Neighborland, for example, tries to influence the likelihood of a commuter rail extension in Denver, it can attract only 51 “neighbours” backing it. Their well-meaning comments are unlikely to change the situation much—that billions of dollars would need to be found, somehow, from within a culture not predisposed to funding sustainable public transit. Neighborland is a wonderful example of a new platform, but in itself it is not enough to create a new decision-making culture for making more sustainable decisions. It might however contains the seeds of such a thing, if we see it as a sketch rather than a solution.

For we need to bind the energy and dynamics of social media—those active citizens—to active government too. Government is partly there to take such disruptive innovations and productively absorb them into a resilient system that smoothes social inequalities and generates broader access. How should Helsinki take the spirit of Ravintolpäivä and learn from it, to shape its own regulations and culture such that the city benefits from better-quality street food, a facility with diverse urban cultures, and more active, democratic use of the street? Can we enable systemic outcomes rather than simply one-offs?

Equally, crowdfunding systems, by their very nature, will rarely enable a systemic change. They create a tapestry of one-offs and events, but will rarely generate city-wide services or infrastructure. While this might or might not be a problem, depending on the service in question and your point-of-view, the ability to shape legislation, governance and effective services in order to produce urban social equity (or mobility) must surely depend on watching, listening, learning, and acting in response.”

1 Comment Smart citizens (3): crowdfunding platforms and the year of collaborative city-making

  1. Øyvind HolmstadØyvind Holmstad

    “But, by contrast, in the early phases of industrial society which we have experienced recently, the pattern languages die.
    Instead of being widely shared, the pattern languages which determine how a town gets made become specialized and private. Roads are built by highway engineers; buildings by architects; parks by planners; hospitals by hospital consultants; schools by educational specialists; gardens by gardeners; tract housing by developers.

    The people of the town themselves know hardly any of the languages which these specialists use. And if they want to find out what these languages contain, they can’t, because it is considered professional expertise. The professionals guard their language jealously to make themselves indispensable.

    Even within any profession, professional jealousy keeps people from sharing their pattern languages. Architects, like chefs, jealously guard their recipes, so that they can maintain unique style to sell.

    The languages start out to being specialized and hidden from the people; and then within the specialties, the languages become more private still, and hidden from another, and fragmented.” – The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, page 231-232

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