Loomio
Fri 17 Apr 2015 3:56AM

Open Space : Open Source City-Making

CWH Chloe Waretini (Loomio Helper) Public Seen by 265

Hey everyone - thanks so much for coming along to the discussion today! Please feel free to add in your notes here or other things on this topic that you'd like to discuss.

For those of you who weren't able to make it along but are interested in this topic then I'll post up a brief summary and links from the discussion here tomorrow :-)

P&B

PAN & BAM | Creator: Stephen Chernishov Fri 17 Apr 2015 4:00AM

Yehaa :)
Some pen powered notes have also been posted with Massey design team in hall :)_

MR

Michael Reynolds Fri 17 Apr 2015 4:58AM

I am so into its space....looking forward to catching up to you folks.

CY

Camia Young Sat 18 Apr 2015 8:56AM

@chloewaretini thanks for starting the group, happy to chime in on a conversation. Perhaps best started with a question, who has one they are keen to think on together?

DC

David Cohen Sat 18 Apr 2015 8:51PM

What open processes are there we can use to attract the attention of planners to help shape cites we want to live in?

And I apologise for the outsize scope of that question.

GC

Greg Cassel Sat 18 Apr 2015 9:06PM

I think that planners can potentially be incentivized by anything which will help them to be perceived as reasonably direct champions of the communities and people they serve. Of course, that requires a will to genuinely engage with the communities, which can become part of the city-making culture if innovators feel sufficiently supported.

DC

David Cohen Sat 18 Apr 2015 10:52PM

My apologies - I used the wrong term. Rather than planners (who actually do the work), I was actually thinking about those who dictate policy for what they do: business and political interests.

GC

Greg Cassel Sun 19 Apr 2015 12:39AM

Well, I think the local governments should be intimately engaged in ongoing dialogue with the local community. Neither business nor political interests should be dictating policy IMO, but of course we know that they tend to have immense (and often hidden) influence on policy choices. I think that increasingly open and accessible, comprehensible organizational structures, operations and data can reduce these problems, and foster an ongoing transformation towards genuinely democratic design.

In other words, I think that all of the general principles and practices of open government and open business will help to get cities shaped in an inclusively humanistic way. So I guess I'm giving a really generic and outsized answer to the broad question!

DC

David Cohen Sun 19 Apr 2015 10:54PM

My major concern is when those in power overrule all those processes. How can the processes be made to "stick" to those accountable and provide a check on their power? At the moment we have no protections, such as recall legislation, in New Zealand, which might be a start.

A specific example. I live in Dunedin. A covered stadium was built here at a cost of around 240 million dollars against much expert advice and the majority of consultation input received. That all the councillors who supported the project lost their positions in the subsequent local elections would indicate the citizens didn't want it. Unfortunately, by then, the work was at a stage it couldn't be stopped without huge penalties, so the work was finished on something that is now losing a spectacular amount of money and doesn't actually add that much to the city's well being.

MR

Michael Reynolds Mon 20 Apr 2015 1:36AM

This is a common tale in Christchurch...well at least the bit about building white elephants and ignoring the will of the citizens.

Is it an option for communities to bulk their own governance structures to make decisions about infrastructure that directly impacts their local community?

When those decisions are made then there is a korero with a municipal body to apportion land ownership via a land trust to that local community? Or something similar...?

I feel we have gotten to the point where we need to empower ourselves to the point where governance serves us rather than the other way around.

GC

Greg Cassel Mon 20 Apr 2015 5:18PM

"That all the councillors who supported the project lost their positions in the subsequent local elections would indicate the citizens didn’t want it." -- Well, this also seems to indicate at least something of a democracy was present there. One could well follow up by investigating whether or not many of those former councillors have ended up in economic relationships with the stadium's builders. (That's a role for investigative journalism, of course; not for someone like me making a snapshot assessment of some complex issue.)

Load More