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From increasing community events to addressing tough issues such as affordable housing and policing, community engagement can help local governments connect with their residents to address these pressing issues together.
As your city grows, consult your community to help guide public investments, land-use decisions, and policy choices that balance growth with local needs.
Creative placemaking reflects deep commitments to local arts and culture and can make public spaces come alive. These projects can both transform and memorialize the character and vitality of neighborhoods, so it’s critical to include the community in your efforts.
Engage your tenants and leaseholders to shape together the housing services offered across your council area. Community engagement is an opportunity to identify challenges and set priorities together with your residents.
CitizenLab’s community engagement platform helps you launch projects using a variety of consultation methods, without having to juggle different tools.
Crowdsource ideas directly from residents to gain valuable insights into how they use (or would like to use) their local public spaces.
Let your community members allocate a budget to their favorite project ideas, and get insights into what they think you should invest in.
Collaborate with your community by organizing live discussions and facilitating online, real-time deliberation.
We believe that community engagement doesn’t have to be hard. To enable all local governments to tap into the benefits of community engagement, we’ve put together inspirational case studies and practical blog posts showing real examples of how our platform has been deployed as a solution for various use cases.
With around 300,000 residents, Newham is one of the biggest and most diverse boroughs in London, so it should be no surprise that it’s not new to community engagement. In fact, Newham’s recent leadership has prioritized involving residents and creating a more participatory democracy, including via a dedicated Resident Engagement and Participation team.
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Combining online and offline participation is often the best engagement option to reach a wide audience. Almere, a city in the Dutch province of Flevoland, decided to create a comprehensive strategy to support its older population.
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The city of Ghent has a longstanding tradition of participation. Recently, the city has not only quintupled its budget for participation projects but has also gathered an extensive team of participation experts and “neighborhood directors” to make co-creation even easier.
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COVID-19 forced us to evaluate how and when we share space, and nowhere was that more visible than on once-busy streets and sidewalks. Americans cut their driving in half, roads were closed to cars in order to create public spaces, and outdoor restaurants (or “streeteries”) popped up seemingly overnight.
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Public spaces should be equitably distributed, open to everyone, and inclusively designed. It’s no wonder that many urban planning processes now focus on placemaking, the people-centered approach to planning and design of public spaces.
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In recent years, citizens’ assemblies, panels, and committees have increasingly been implemented at all levels of government across the globe. They’ve been particularly useful to address polarizing issues such as climate change, with the infamous Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat commissioned by French President Macron as a recent national-level example.
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A citizens' assembly is an in-depth discussion around key city topics between a randomly selected group of residents. Together they come up with recommendations that can help with public decision-making. Thanks to their diverse backgrounds and independence, the residents help come up with more inclusive and innovative ideas.
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