Chapter 8: Civic Engagement in the Maker City
Why a Maker City is Open to Engagement
The greatest expression of a Maker City are residents with the skills, ideas, and will to Make the city itself.
“Over the next decade and beyond, cities will continue to capture the imaginations of people around the globe — drawing in nearly a billion new urban dwellers and spurring the largest and fastest reinvention of our built environment in human history. As cities grow, traditional top-down approaches will be insufficient to meet the basic needs of citizens or fulfill their aspirations. Already, citizens and Makers are stepping in to fill this gap, leveraging emerging technologies to remake the stuff, services, and systems of urban life itself.” — Ben Hamamoto, Institute for the Future (2014)
The United States has a long tradition of communities coming together to make things collaboratively, a tradition that started with barn raising in our rural communities and was reinterpreted more recently with Habitat for Humanity bringing together volunteers from all walks of life to build affordable housing for those who can least afford it. The Maker examples cited in this chapter follow in that tradition.
In this chapter, we’ll talk about how Makers are continuing, and building on, a long tradition of civic engagement, to take what is working, build on it, and in the process work to correct parts of our cities that are not functioning as well as we would like.
Examples will be drawn from tactical urbanism in three different areas:
- Housing advocacy (Seattle)
- Open-space design (San Francisco)
- Urban prototyping (San Francisco)
We’ll also bring in examples from New York City, Boston, and Chattanooga, as we talk about how cities are closing the digital divide and engaging young people in civic action.
One of our underlying themes here is that good ideas flow from experiments. Some experiments work, some don’t, but learning from failure and then improving on it is an essential part of innovation.
Another theme is that technology — its culture, methods, and tools — can work both as a kind of glue and as an accelerant when it comes to change.
Housing Advocacy in Seattle: The Importance of Starting Small
In the Maker City it is not enough to make something that is simply innovative. To make innovation stick, Makers must learn how to work across sectors, with established city leaders and nonprofit organizations to build acceptance for what they’ve made. One way to do so is to tie Makers’ work to the bigger agenda at work inside their city.
A group of Makers in Seattle did this to good effect. Mayor Murray declared a “state of emergency” around homelessness in late 2015. Makers there were able to create a village of 14 tiny homes that was well-received by city officials.
The Seattle project is called “Tiny House Village” and is championed by the Low Income Housing Institute, a nonprofit that both develops and builds housing for low-income people, working closely with city officials to coordinate supportive services and obtain land use rights and permits. So far there are three tiny house villages in Seattle.
This is an example of the Maker mindset applied to civic engagement at its very best.
The 14 tiny homes that were built represent an experiment of a new form of housing for the homeless that can be built very quickly and at minimum cost. The advocacy group that built these homes did not ask for formal permission and did not seek permits. Yet the model was and is highly replicable. Tiny home villages can now be found in Fresno, California; Eugene, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin; and Austin, Texas. (Source: Christian Science Monitor, 2016)
Tiny houses are an example of what urban planners call “Tactical Urbanism:” a project purposefully built to solve a problem and fielded as an experiment versus created as a permanent fixture.
Tiny homes can help relieve the problem of homelessness temporarily by giving the homeless a place to live that offers them both dignity and privacy.
Recently housing advocates in Oakland, launched Pop-Up home build days which created Tiny Homes on Wheels for the homeless. Of course, tiny houses are not a panacea. Experts in NYC think of tiny houses as more of a “niche solution” to housing the homeless.
Our point is this: Makers can create solutions to problems as a set of experiments very rapidly. Some experiments succeed, others fail, but Makers’ willingness to experiment provides a positive example, one that encourages city officials and established nonprofits to work together with the community to come up with more permanent and broad-reaching solutions.
Reshaping Public Parks: Makers Keep it Real
Another example of tactical urbanism comes from San Francisco which pioneered the concept of turning parking spots into small parks called “parklets.” Parklets convert private auto parking space into additional public gathering space.
The original Parklet concept was created by Rebar Art and Design Studio (now Morelab and Gehl Studio) in 2005 by transforming a single metered parking space into a public park in San Francisco. The Parklet was launched as an open source project in 2006, when Rebar had the first ever Park(ing) Day and it has since become an international event. Park(ing) Day occurs annually on the third Friday in September, in hundreds of cities around the globe.
Open sourcing the Parklet idea allowed the concept to scale rapidly and have broader impact which inspired Mayor Gavin Newsom to support an effort to make an official Pavement to Parks program in 2009. This in turn allowed parklets to become an official part of San Francisco’s landscape. The parklet program has continued under Mayor Ed Lee, in an effort to reduce automobile traffic, turn parking spots into public plazas, and convert excess roadway into places for people to congregate.
The idea is simple. The city provides the space and the review process; private entities (merchants, community organizations, individuals) submit a site plan, step in and implement the parklet, and are responsible for maintenance, insurance, and opening up the parklet to the public. About 42 proposals were received in 2009 from private entities which resulted in 38 parklets being built in 2010.
One of the parklets on Valencia Street between 23rd and 24th Streets, in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, was built by young people from the area working in conjunction with a grant from the National Science Foundation and the Exploratorium. The Mission District of San Francisco has historically been a poor, working class, Spanish-speaking neighborhood. More recently, the Mission has been in the news because rapid gentrification is displacing families that have lived there for generations.
San Francisco Boys & Girls Clubs (BGC) and a team from the Exploratorium’s Studio for Public Spaces took charge of the parklet, taking over two years to build it. It was structured, quite literally, as a science experiment; one of the goals of the parklet-called Casa Ciencia Pública: Agua-is to encourage discussions around water and sustainable water use.
The people who worked to build the Casa Ciencia Pública: Agua parklet on Valencia Street did not necessarily call themselves “Makers.” Only in retrospect can we think of the woodworkers, welders, iron workers, fabricators, and construction workers who stepped up from the community to help build the parklet as Makers.
The parklet concept was immediately popular. Most were successful, but some did not go so well, striking the wrong chord with city officials or members of the community and were ultimately taken down. One city supervisor found the parklet below, designed and built by a design firm with a national reputation at a cost of $40K, objectionable for stylistic reasons.
(This parklet remains in place … despite some initial resistance.)
Other parklets contained structures that people in the neighborhood found too commercial, interfered with traffic in unexpected ways, or proved to be too “cookie cutter.”
As of 2014, there were 43 parklets in San Francisco, many beloved features of their neighborhoods. (Source: Curbed, 2014)
The Maker movement and tactical urbanism share a passion for experimentation, a willingness to plan for failure, and a reliance on tinkering and rapid iteration to achieve success.
In 2011/12, city officials expanded the parklet website to accommodate the high level of interest in the program and to help other municipalities around the country who had shown interest in developing their own parklet programs. The website provides the following:
- A detailed roadmap as an infographic so that everyone involved in the parklet program can see and understand time frames and next steps at every point of the process
- A materials list making it easy for anyone with DIY skills to participate in building the parklet
- A policy framework that explains why the city is interested in seeing parklets flourish and so that merchants and Makers can create proposals that are responsive to the city’s needs
- Detailed permitting requirements specifying exactly how proposals from the merchants will be viewed
Makers are ideal for fabricating parklets. They work inexpensively, make innovative use of materials, and, to the extent they come from the neighborhood, know what is appropriate to build there. While there is no “average cost” for a parklet, anecdotal evidence suggests that costs can be reduced through the involvement of Makers.
Urban Prototyping — Hacking Our Way to Better Streets
Conventional Urban Planning processes make it difficult to implement great ideas for civic improvement. It now takes four times as long to move along civic infrastructure projects than it did in the 1970s. This might well be a reaction to planning czars like New York’s Robert Moses “titan of the skyline” — who was famous for legendary speed and efficiency (and the ability to route around any agency in his way), but also for running rough-shod through neighborhoods with roads and slum clearing projects without much interest in community input or participation.
“The traditional model of city-making has historically involved experts with a definitive, long-term plan executed over time. The issue with that is that culture changes faster than infrastructure; we’ve surpassed our ability to keep up. One of the consequences is that we’re left living in cities we planned 50 to 60 years ago.” (Source: Interview with Blaine Merker, Gehl Studio on Gizmodo, 2013)
Could a model popular in the tech industry–experimentation and rapid iteration–be applied to the process of city planning?
Urban Prototyping complements city processes by rapidly testing, sharing, and scaling new citizen-sourced projects that improve civic life. The concept was initially developed by non-profit organization Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (Gray Area) based on several years of producing civic hackathons aimed at the creation of digital civic applications in partnership with city government. You can think of Urban Prototyping as a multi-year hackathon for the betterment of the public realm.
In 2012, Gray Area partnered with Intersection for the Arts to produce the first Urban Prototyping Festival which took shape around the 5th and Market and 5th and Mission intersections in San Francisco. A total of $25K was invested in 25 prototypes that were developed over 3–6 months and deployed through a weekend street closure permit. The street festival allowed for 5,000 citizens to experience redesigned sidewalks with everything from new concepts for street lighting to public urinals developed by Makers. The goal of Urban Prototyping was not only to showcase projects but to also uncover urban planning conventions and permitting processes that were ripe for innovation.
A new permit type was developed shortly thereafter in 2013 called Living Innovation Zones allowing for temporary installations to activate sites along Market Street.
Market Street is one of the most traveled streets in the city, filled with pedestrians, public transit, and tourists. Many iconic companies have their headquarters on Market Street including Dolby, Twitter, and Zendesk.
At the same time, walking along Market Street can feel a bit disconnected. There are few opportunities to pause, linger, or converse with others, or to connect with the local community in any way.
Building a Better Market Street is high on Mayor Ed Lee’s agenda for San Francisco. Mayors care about quality of life and economic development, two issues that come together on Market Street. In the course of developing a plan for “A Better Market Street,” The San Francisco Planning Department and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) with a grant from the Knight Foundation launched the Market Street Prototyping Festival.
The 2015 Market St. Prototyping Festival selected 50 teams to build prototypes of interactive sidewalk installations for placement along the Market Street artery as part of a three-day festival that happened in April 2015. Each prototype had to meet specific criteria in terms of community activation and design laid out in an open call.
The actual Making by the 50 teams happened over six months, working in partnership with ‘District Captains’ such as Autodesk and the Exploratorium to build out prototypes. The Market Street Prototyping festival attracted over 250,000 visitors and 25,000 people participated on the Neighborland festival project site, where citizens could comment and vote on the proposed projects.
A detailed evaluation of the impact of the Festival was provided by Gehl Architects. The Gehl report showed that the Market Street Prototyping Festival was successful at engaging the community, building capacity in the design community to build more of these types of solutions, and increasing connectivity by encouraging visitors to Market Street to linger and engage with each other. The Gehl Architects’ Report is worth downloading and reading in its entirety. All of the projects displayed on Market Street–with detailed instructions on how to build them–can be found on the Instructables site.
Today, the festival is positioned to happen annually, bookended with an Incubation program called the Urban Prototyping Research Lab, led by Autodesk and Gray Area, allowing for further development to transform prototypes into semi-permanent installations.
All of the Market Street Prototyping Festival efforts will ultimately inform the final multi-million dollar effort to repave Market Street. Through the Planning Department’s willingness to crowdsource projects from Makers, and YBCA’s efforts to engage the local community, a true experience of being nimble and allowing experimentation is unfolding to create a more vibrant experience for the public.
“By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Urban Prototyping Success Factors
- Find one or more local arts groups and city departments to champion your effort, one that understands the Maker mindset and Maker culture. Choose alliances with city leaders, local organizations and potential funders that can stay on to scale the projects.
- Think small. It’s easier to get one small experiment off the ground than to seek permits and permission for something larger and more permanent. Governments seem to be more comfortable with the terms prototypes and pilots than any term that hints at permanence.
- Model your prototyping project as a makeathon or other open competition. This format is well-established and well-understood within the Maker community.
- Build time into your project for citizen engagement. One great way to do this is by posting your project on Neighborland for public commentary and voting.
- Don’t go Guerrilla. You want to work with city officials not against them as much as possible. If you must ‘go rogue’ do so by declaring your effort “just a prototype”, to reduce initial resistance.
- Plan for obsolescence. After the completion of Market Street Prototyping Festival, an Incubation program was developed to take the prototypes to semi-permanent installations for a period of up to 2 years.
- Figure out how to measure success. Ideally, get someone not involved with designing the project to evaluate its success.
- Leverage scarcity. The Bay Lights project is an example of how scarcity can work to your city’s advantage with urban prototyping.
Scarcity in Action: The Bay Lights project
This is a light sculpture made up of nearly 12,000 LEDs designed by artist Leo Villareal and affixed to the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The lights shined from dusk until dawn for a two-year period: March 2013 to March 2015.
Engaged citizens lobbied for the project’s return and raised money from several sources, including from state coffers (California Arts Commission) and through a crowdfunding site. Today The Bay Lights are back on and there is funding to keep the sculpture running through 2026.
Another lesson learned here is that if you have a big idea, declare it as “just a prototype.” There is no way the various agencies would have approved a permanent project on an iconic bridge. But a two-year prototype was approved and went on to win widespread affection from the community.
The Maker City is made by everyone
Much of the thinking around the evolving hackathon format, came from a pioneering project called Creative Currency designed to create a baseline of understanding on how to field a civic hackathon event, one that allows for more civic engagement and a greater amount of time devoted to making. A traditional hackathon is designed for coders and technologists to show how they can solve a constrained problem in a specific period of time, say 48–72 hours over a weekend. At a hackathon, people work side-by-side with each other, eat a lot of pizza, and at the end of the event showcase what they’ve built to a set of judges in a competitive setting. A great how-to guide to run your own technology-based hackathon is available from Socrata, a company that sells cloud-based solutions for digital government.
Key learnings from the Creative Currency Project were:
- Community Engagement is essential for any civic hackathon
Without it, your city will get eager participants with software and technical skills, volunteers who are enthusiastic about urban change, but no one steeped in the community and the changes the community wants to see. The community outreach phase is essential to develop the knowledge and experience to guide civic hackers and link them with community needs. - Ideas can be developed very rapidly in the prototyping phase, allowing participants to suggest and demo new approaches
Any ideas with merit need at least two months of development and iterative feedback before they are ready to be presented to the community. - The importance of demo day, seed money, and ongoing mentoring
As with code-oriented hackathons, a civic hackathon results in a demo day, where the best ideas are presented to judges and the community, ideally as working prototypes. Seed money and mentoring by a nonprofit organization are ideal to turn winning prototypes into a meaningful test in your city.
Open Data is an Invitation
San Francisco was one of the first cities to open up its data to its citizens. Today, about 46 cities and counties across the US have open-data initiatives. San Francisco is a leader here, requiring all its departments to make their data available so as to increase transparency and citizen engagement in local government. To that end, the city of San Francisco makes 524 different machine-readable datasets available through its open data portal: data.sfgov.org. XML has been called the lingua franca of the web for good reason: it is a structured data format that is easy to download, easy to work with, and designed to play nicely with other data sets.
Opening Up the Data in Your City has Unexpected Consequences:
- It encourages citizen journalism. Citizens analyze the data and blog about their findings on platforms like Medium (long form) and Twitter (microblogging), gain followers, and encourage action.
- It can be used as the basis of public art, to start a dialogue about things happening in your city that need to be changed.
- It surfaces problems to city officials in a way that is hard to ignore.
Case Study of Open Data in Action: The Tenderloin Noise and Crime Spotting Projects
Cities are, by their very nature, noisy. The bigger the city, the more likely you are to hear a cacophony of sirens, automobiles, high decibel conversations, and even gun shots.
Recognizing this in 2010, artists at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts teamed with the engineering firm Arup, the design firm Stamen, and the tech firm Movity (now part of Trulia), as well as coders from the community to deploy noise sensors in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco.
The Tenderloin is a vibrant but very poor neighborhood, an assemblage of families with children, drug addicts, elderly folks, the disabled, recent immigrants, and people of color all in a 40-block radius. Crime is much higher here than elsewhere in the city. Neighborhood policing here can best be described as a game of whack-a-mole. Police move in and shut down one corner to drug dealers and IV-drug users, only to see that same activity pop up a few blocks away.
The project started with a hackathon, where data sets were made available to all who wanted to participate, including Arup, Stamen, Motivity but also– and most importantly–coders drawn from the community.
The output of the Noise Project was a detailed map that pinpointed areas in the Tenderloin that were hotspots for noise.
At the same time Stamen Design created Crime Spotting to visualize neighborhood crime data. Folks involved in the Tenderloin Noise and Crime Spotting Projects were wary of presenting their findings to folks in the community, as they highlighted the Tenderloin’s many problems. Also, the sensors were set up without explicit permission from city officials.
To everyone’s relief and surprise, community organizers, police, fire, and other city officials turned out to be excited (very!) by the data uncovered by the project teams working with the noise and crime data. Community activists got involved, lobbied for change, and worked with the police to establish portable police hubs in the ‘hood. In short order, neighborhood policing in the Tenderloin shifted from a reactive mode–responding to crime after it happened–to an approach that was more proactive.
Programs similar to the Tenderloin Noise and Crime Spotting Project popped up in Los Angeles and other cities as part of a broader trend toward installing sensors as an input to intelligence-led policing.
This type of reaction to open data, as seen in the TenderNoise and Crime Spotting Projects, has been dubbed the “Read Write” phenomenon by urbanist Adam Greenfield (2010). In the Maker City, data from city agencies gets mashed up with other data sets in ways that bring city problems into sharp focus. Citizen engagement around the data accelerates change. The more transparent you can make your city’s data, the better.
Today, there are sensors everywhere in San Francisco. The sensors are low cost and consume very little energy thanks to a partnership with SIGFOX. San Francisco gave SIGFOX the right to deploy its radio network for sensors and devices on public buildings. In exchange the City got the infrastructure it needed to support an entirely new class of applications, based on the internet of things and created by civic hackers. Sensors cost only $1 each and can be used to monitor the city’s water pipes for leaks and for predictive maintenance of the city’s fleet of vehicles.
Let the Makers Deploy the Sensors
As city spreadsheets get converted to XML by city departments, Makers are continuously finding ways to harness their own real-time data through DIY Sensor Networks. Take the Data Canvas: Sense Your City Project, produced by swissnex San Francisco, Gray Area, and SEEED Studio. One-hundred (100) low-cost environmental sensors were deployed by makers in 7 different cities around the world to harness data for research and visualization.
During deployment, each sensor site hosted workshops to teach citizens how to make their own sensors based on an instructional video and open source guide produced by Data Canvas. Not only can large companies like SIGFOX or City Governments deploy technology, Makers can use a mesh network approach to scale sensors and other civic infrastructure. Smart Citizen is an ongoing project that allows Makers to use open source technology for political participation in smarter cities.
In short, this is something a Maker City can replicate very easily without too much trouble, providing it thinks ahead to establish an open data policy and gets a community-based organizations using that data.
The Importance of Bridging the Digital Divide
There’s a significant digital divide in our cities. Blair Evans of the Brookings Institute commented:
“[In February 2016], the New York Times ran an article on how the digital divide particularly affects schoolchildren, creating what they termed a ‘homework gap.’”
The article illustrates vividly that, today, a person’s full participation in the economy and civic life requires connectivity.
Maker Cities recognize this and work to get more citizens engaged by providing ready access to low-cost, high-bandwidth internet connectivity.
To do this, New York City started small and worked up from there to build an ambitious program offering. One of the first programs started by connecting just five community rooms inside public housing run by NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) to the internet. A second program brought a digital van into NYCHA housing developments so that residents could do their homework, look for jobs, and connect with city officials to advocate for change.
Maya Wiley has been involved in programs to close the digital divide in NY since 2014 as an advisor to Mayor deBlasio and head of the task force he created to expand affordable broadband access across all five boroughs. She notes:
“Technology, like broadband access, is literally like water or electricity was at the turn of the century — you can’t really do any of the things that build opportunity without it. If we’re going to produce more and better-paying jobs, if we’re going to improve educational outcomes, if we’re going to make sure people can engage with the city effectively … folks have to have the technology and the ability to utilize it.” (Source: City Lab, 2015)
A list of programs happening in NYC alone to bridge the digital divide and make broadband utilities available to all citizens, just like electricity, water, and heat includes:
- NYC Connected Communities
- NYCHA Digital Van
- NYCHA Community Computer Centers
- Community Technology Centers
Each program started out small and many started out as grass root efforts versus top-down initiatives driven by the city. But the sum of all the programs together adds up to a New York City well on its way to making broadband a municipal utility. Under the DeBlasio administration New York is deploying its most ambitious connectivity program yet: converting 7,500 former pay phones across the five boroughs into new structures called LinkNYC which will provide free WIFI, phone calls, device charging and access to city services, maps and directions.
Similar programs are happening in Kansas City, Missouri, through an information partnership with Google/Alphabet Fiber; in Lafayette, Louisiana; and in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
We want to zero in on Chattanooga, Tennessee as an example of what is possible. Chattanooga is home to “The Gig,” a broadband offering with internet access as fast as one gigabit per second — about 50 times faster than the US average. About 60,000 residents of Chattanooga (population 171,000) and 4,500 businesses subscribe to The Gig at prices that range from $29 — $100 and up per month. The $29/month fee is targeted at low-income families with children, those who qualify for food stamps. This eliminates the homework divide we talked about earlier, enabling all children, regardless of means, to access the internet.
The Gig didn’t just happen. It took a push from a forward-looking Mayor, Mayor Andy Berke, to make it happen plus federal funds. Today, The Gig is credited with an economic/entrepreneurial revival in Chattanooga with the following results:
- Three very large employers have moved in and set up shop: Alstom (which makes turbines for power plants), Amazon (with a distribution center bigger than 17 football fields), and VW (which employs 2,500 workers in an auto plant that cost $1B to build)
- Chattanooga has gone from practically zero venture capital in 2009 to more than five organized funds with investable capital over $50M in 2014. (Source: The Guardian, 2014)
- A flourishing ecosystem exists to encourage entrepreneurial activity. (Source: Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 2016)
- Retail and real estate are both taking off with double-digit growth (Source: Wall Street Journal, 2012)
- Employment is up and unemployment is down. The population is growing.
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Obama Administration, and city government all credit The Gig with serving as a catalyst for economic development for Chattanooga; not too shabby for the city once called the dirtiest in America!
Still, municipal broadband is not without its challengers. Several states outlaw municipal broadband, reflecting the broad power of the telecom lobby. In response, the Obama administration authored a detailed report and set aside $7B for cities and metropolitan areas to make broadband available as a municipal service.
With broadband connectivity in place, citizens in the Maker city are able to advocate for specific projects that they know will make a difference in their city.
Engaging Students in Civic Participation
The key to civic innovation is engaging more people in the actual task of addressing city problems, and one of the greatest resources is students. As we have seen in the education chapter of this Maker City Playbook, when students are touched by the tools of Making they light up and can become deeply engaged in projects. The same is true when students are exposed to, asked to learn about, and solve real problems in the city. It’s a twenty-first century approach to civic education where the city becomes a living lab. Contrast that with twentieth century civics (now seldom taught) which was a famously static affair: students were taught the branches of government or how a bill is passed, which is tough to directly relate to. In today’s approach civics can be a verb: it is something you do, and then often see results.
Citizen Schools is a national organization that engages mentors to work with at-risk urban middle school students in after school programs. The act of pairing students with professionals who are in technology, manufacturing, or finance is in itself enlightening and confidence-building. One of the Citizen Schools’ programs engages kids in the process of city planning, providing an apprenticeship in the architectural design process.
During the ten-week program students are introduced to the basics of urban planning and its connection to the social life of communities, taught to conduct ethnographic research, and shown how to use that research to formulate and design plans. Final presentations are delivered in front of urban planners and city officials. One can be excused for confusing this ten-week plan for middle schoolers with a graduate exercise in urban studies!
Apprenticeships have included designing a neighborhood, planning a community center, designing a playground, and reimagining a Boston MTA station. There is a full 100-page curriculum and how-to manual available from the Citizen Schools website.
Generation Citizen
Real world urban problems can be turned into student-led solutions. That’s the mission of Generation Citizen, a national organization that takes the concept of civics and turns it into action projects where students understand, propose solutions, and act on their world.
Students find very real problems that affect their lives, problems they might otherwise feel no agency over, then research options, come up with solutions, and ultimately present their ideas to leaders to lobby for and supervise change.
For example, urban water quality has been in the news, with the crisis in Flint, Michigan illustrating the very real implications of water infrastructure decisions. Students at the Abraham Lincoln School Green Academy in San Francisco noticed a problem with water at their own school. Their campus recorded the second-highest water usage in the entire school district due in large part to an outdated infrastructure and a non-turf football field. However, students also weren’t drinking from the school’s dirty fountains, opting instead to buy sugary beverages or plastic water bottles.
Students decided to take multi-pronged action on water conservation at their school. They convinced the SF Public Utilities Commission to come to their campus to conduct water testing of toilets, sinks, and fountains. They were successful in getting new automatic sinks installed in all school restrooms from the school district, and testified at a SFUSD Board of Education meeting to demand more water filter stations and updated water infrastructure in schools district-wide. They wrote grants for water catch systems and improved appliances for their campus and met with Supervisor Katy Tang to request funding support at the district level.
In a twist to the traditional hackathon, Generation Citizen’s Civic Tech Challenge pairs students with young adult software and hardware developers to address civic problems. The students specify the problems and act as “clients” with the hackers building out solutions and mentoring students. In Boston, in November 2015, teams addressed data visualization to reduce youth homelessness, and developed several projects to take on the issue of gun violence through petitions, online social media, and a take action website. Using a classic web awareness/conversion/action model, students studied how they might have a real voice, then worked with hack teams to make sure their stories and proposals were heard by legislators and the Mayor. Because students cannot vote, often they do not get heard by city officials, teaching them at an early age that their default mode is to be disengaged from civic life. Not so with Makers!
These techniques can be practiced by any youth organization: schools, museums, boys and girls clubs, and more. What they have in common is bringing a Maker mentality to the civic realm.
Civics was once a static description of how government works. No longer.
Today civics can be about action, engagement and creation: a set of active steps to research and deploy thoughtful prototype solutions. Students can apply a holistic approach to learning about a city’s problems, engaging with mentors about solutions and formulating an approach using today’s tools of Making and coding. This teaches civic responsibility and conveys a powerful sense of agency (I have control over my world!) that is essential for raising a generation of lifelong learners, Maker-capable citizens who can be productive in our coming economy and help reshape their world.
Implications for Cities
To open up a city to citizen engagement, Maker Cities are creating programs to:
- Open up their data. It turns out that open data is an invitation for citizen engagement in the city.
- Create opportunities for experimental programs on the streets of the city — what urban planning types call “tactical urbanism.”
- Use technology to engage citizens who might otherwise be left behind in shaping the Maker City.
- Continually experiment through hackathons and festivals.
- Scale experiments through partnerships with academia, private companies, and public agencies. In other words, form cross-sector partnerships that insert Makers inside more established and establishment organizations.
- Start young! Engaged citizens are not born that way but need to be nurtured from a young age. Get Makers involved early, at the stage of a project where previously you might have involved a design-build architecture firm or star architect.
