EngagingCities

App developers are promising that any citizen with a smart phone can take part in planning their city like never before. But is there more to community engagement than what you can fit within the borders of a screen?

Civics, Civility and Community—How to Get People Re-engaged Civilly by Orton Family Foundation. Heart & Soul Talks Webinar Recap

Pantry is an excellent middle-English word for a very 21st century idea: a peer-to-peer community food collective creating larder-filling products and changing lives in one of London's poorest boroughs.Here's how the program started: enthusiastic amateur cooks in Barking and Dagenham were given expert advice on refining their favorite home recipes into sellable products, perfecting batch-cooking, developing packaging design and sourcing ingredients. Finally, tastings were arranged, and the products were tested in market stalls.

Curbed spoke with 11 of today’s design leaders to assess its impact.

Ride-hailing companies, delivery vehicles, and electric scooters are all vying for a piece of the curb. Here's how cities can manage this increasingly precious resource.

As U.S. cities grapple with the repercussions of decades of redlining and other discriminatory housing policies, MacArthur fellow Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt offers a road map for how online communities can spark meaningful dialogue between neighbors.

More and more devices are plugging into your government’s corner of the Internet of Things (IoT), but are we truly implementing the right projects in 'smart' ways? Here’s what you need to know about the state of smart cities opportunities along with some potholes to avoid and questions to be answered.

Metropolis spoke with architect and RPPR president Jonathan Marvel about the initiative's work and what it aims to accomplish.

Panthea Lee, co-founder at Reboot US, provides a fascinating insight into how civic tech can be better used in advancing the role of participatory budgeting.

Too often, the people working to strengthen democracy have been caught flat-footed by the pace of new trends and innovations. All kinds of changes, many of them driven by technology, affect how we live, work, vote, interact, and get information. It’s always been difficult to understand the implications of trends in the moment, but it’s even harder today because knowledge is so vast and specialized with experts on each trend often isolated from one another, without an overarching map for everyone to see.

Rewiring Democracy: Subconscious Technologies, Conscious Engagement, and the Future of Politics is an attempt to anticipate how the next set of changes will affect democracy, map the intersections of different trends and inform how we should respond.

The company formerly known as WeWork is hiring designer Dror Benshetrit to lead its future cities initiatives.

In December, I started exploring if the community-local government partnerships known as civic tech can grow from a few of North Carolina’s larger cities to other parts of the state.  There are about 70 groups nationwide where volunteers use government open data to address community needs through creating free apps or other IT products. TheRead More

Inspiration, hope, and progress. These are the thoughts that come to mind when I think of Code for America Summit. I’m inspired by the stories, many successful, some still a work in progress–these stories are highlighted on the main stage as well as in other parts of the conference.

Love is more than just a feeling, though. The emotional bonds people create with their communities also have a powerful impact on economic prosperity.

Gender-specific “Frauenticket” will be 21% cheaper than usual and available on 18 March in stunt to flag German pay gap

5 insightful civic tech podcasts handpicked by the CitizenLab team to help you stay on top of what's new in the field of digital democracy.

Plus, Stanford University policy lab releases data on millions of U.S. traffic stops; three takeaways from Open Data Day 2019; and San Antonio passes a new cross-agency data-sharing agreement.

Cities are desperate to tame the sidewalk chaos of the e-scooter industry. One startup offers a solar-powered parking solution.

Los Angeles is a city of 4 million people. And it might soon launch a tiny office — of as many as eight people — to help those residents better participate in their government. And in California, this would be a big advance. Because while governance in our state is as complicated as a Google algorithm, we offer precious little assistance to Californians who seek to engage with it. In our state, the people who run for office, vote, and participate in other ways (from attending public meetings to protesting) are whiter, richer and better educated than the state population as a whole.

1,000 smart city pilots are under construction or in their final planning stages across the globe, driving forward countless visions of the future.

Explore Lego Serious Play, a proven tool for boosting both individual and team productivity.

New User Experiences for Cycling is a speculative design film produced by the Future Cities Catapult. The short film proposes five sketch prototypes of potential new cycling experiences based on existing or near-future technologies. These were conceived in response to challenges such as wayfinding, safety or air quality.

For over a decade, Omidyar Network has been supporting and investing in the civic tech sector.  From the very early days we have backed the most talented entrepreneurs who are seeking to use technology to empower citizens or make government more accessible, efficient, and effective. In this time, we’ve invested nearly $90 million in 35 nonprofit and for-profit organizations