CIVIC CROWDFUNDING: A BOTTOM-UP PRACTICE FOR A CONSENSUAL URBAN DEVELOPMENT

Cities are actually transforming their governmental, economic, social structures. In this complexity, making right policies to guarantee the social justice and the quality of life is really difficult: there is not only a financial problems, in consequence of international crisis, but also a relational problem between people and local institutions. The public government can’t provide by itself to all the utilities and public services for the citizens, and, at the same time, people are losing confidence in the institutions. In this critic context, planners should be the conjunction between people and government, applying good and effective participation methods. In this way, citizens could achieve the capacity to suggest decisions, strategies, local interventions, and in some limited cases they also could support economically their proposals through the civic crowdfunding. The value of this practice is not only financial: in this way we can improve the social cohesion, the sense of community, encouraging the bottom-up processes of requalification, increasing the social justice level. In this way, minorities are protected and the urban management is more democratic and inclusive. The role of planners and local governments is fundamental to coordinate and orientate the bottomup initiatives: citizens’ actions could integrate the traditional planning instruments like the participatory budgeting. At last, a very significant contribute can be represented by the IC technologies: there are many crowdfunding web platforms, local or international, and some of this are dedicated to civic projects. In this perspective, civic crowdfunding could be applied as a valid urban planning practice.