How can a small city like Amarante (PT), located less than one hour from medium-sized urban centres such as Braga (PT) or Guimarães (PT), or even from the metropolitan area of Porto (PT), become a competitive economic centre with the well-being for its citizens at its heart? Thanks to a number of innovative actions, Amarante […]
Posts Tagged ‘CHANGE!’

Amarante: improving the city with pioneering actions

People-powered services: big words versus reality?
The outcomes of the “European and US stories of CHANGE!” Breakout Session We often tend to speak about community engagement like a mantra, but it is indeed the core element of collaborative public policies. Before rejecting the idea to engage citizens into the service delivery, because it seems too hard, we need to think critically […]

People-powered services: myth or reality?
An article written in conversation with Eddy Adams. The challenge of citizen participation One of the things that city authorities continue to most struggle with is citizen participation. More than ten years after the Leipzig Charter, which set out the goal of participative integrated urban regeneration, the picture across Europe remains highly uneven. Happily though, […]

Break out of our comfort zones: Play Szociopoly!
How to inspire in a meeting? How to make participants imagine the life of others and of hard choices? In October 2016 I was preparing my next CHANGE! study visit, which was – partly – about how to generate deep insight into the needs of local communities to create meaningful outcomes and thus redesign public […]

Reinvent democracy with Aarhus’ “everyday activists” and habit-breaking “Givisme” culture!
I have never been welcomed by a butler in black overcoat with a top hat, especially not during a formal meeting organised by a city council. Then I was invited to step into a house, which looked like a huge magician’s enormous suitcase and where I found myself somewhere between Alice’s Wonderland and The Addams […]