Citizeneers: the city enablers

These last decades, the economic globalization process (which has tried hard to homogenise all of us and that has installed McDonald’s and Starbucks Coffee in every self-respecting city) have led cities to face new consuming global problems, problems that have been often fought with local solutions surpassing the city’s self-reaction power. As Zygmunt Bauman radically recognized in his book Liquid Times. Living in an age of uncertainty (2007), cities nowadays have become the rubbish dumps for the problems produced at global level. 


Our local urban environments are facing tremendous global concerns such as climate change, budget cuts, population raises and, specially, social discontentment and rupture. Cities have grown spectacularly these last decades mainly because of the arrival of populated waves of immigration. As a consequence, specially in North America and I am seeing this also in Europe, ethnic residential areas have appeared shaping “one-colour” isolated communities. By this impulse of belonging to a similar-minded community, citizens have kept away from the interaction with other realities and, consequently, from direct action.


In this context, the need has become urgent for cities to shift from fragmented barren places to alive spaces that ensure and smoother social cohesion and inclusion. Cities’ leaders, sometimes with limited space of action and lack of resources, have found themselves not enough prepared to allow this change. However, the advance and new possibilities of ICT has revolutionized urban development and has opened new easier channels to enable citizens action in this field. What is the new role for citizens then?


In her great article “The Enabling City”, appeared in the Summer 2011 Issue of Next American City, Chiara Camponeschi recognised the huge importance of political involvement in this radical empowerment change. According to her words decision-makers should commit for: “driving  long-term structural changes by unlocking the capacity of others to meaningfully participate in the life of a user-produced city”. That implies “a shift from control to enablement”.


Moreover, there will be no user-produced city without empowered citizens: citizeneers. As Saskia Sassen explained in this great speech at Lift “The Future of the Smart Cities” (every minute is worth seeing): “the logic of citizens is not the logic of managers”. This means that, to allow future success in urban decisions, citizeneers should be placed at the centre of any action, giving them the tools to be aware of the community’s concerns and the spaces, virtual or not, where to interact with other citizeneers. And government should carefully watch this process. I would like to stress here the watch, implying no action: the power and the action should be given to citizeneers. Using a gardening parallelism, the seed of self-action should be sowed in a fertilised land, left alone and harvested for processing once the plant has grown.


These innovative ways of social cooperation for an inclusive sustainability in cities are not new. Spaces like living labs (which deserve more than one blog’s entry) have been doing for years a great job providing meeting points for citizeneers from different communities and levels of knowledge, ready for interaction and ideas sharing. The first citizeneers have also pioneered in creating their own solutions for non-existing services. The fruit of cooperation for solving the community’s concerns has started to grow: some self-development projects are already here. Just to name some, the reporting tools Fix My Street from UK and Repara Ciudad (in Spanish, according to the website an English version is coming soon) from Spain or the car sharing French initiative BuzzCar (in French).

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