City Mine(d) connects urban gardeners to cyclists, DIY-ers to urban planners, and kitchen chefs to IT-ers through projects in public space. What these people have in common is the use of their creativity to make daily life in cities more fun and more fair.
These initiatives don’t exist to make money or to gain power, but they emerge according to desires or in response to local and urgent needs. At their level, they involve people removed from party politics, ethical consumption or the environment, as well as activists and militants in all those fields.
The big challenges we are confronted with today, that relate to the environment, solidarity or democracy, seem to limit us in our freedom to explore, to produce and even to travel. Taking tables outside in the street and inviting the neighbours, making things yourself and changing derelict places in urban gardens are all positive and creative initiatives, but they are also answers to those big challenges.
In November 2010, City Mine(d) organised an Urban Platform in Brussels that brought together 60 initiatives from 19 cities. In addition to the already existing connections, the platform gave rise to a number of new collaborations. To sustain these collaboration, and to enable new initiatives to get involved, City Mine(d) proposes different tools: a guiding document that can create a sense of belonging and inspire people to action, a collection of definitions by individuals and groups on wikimined.citymined.org, and THIS Platform.
We believe that a truly democratic, non-hierarchical collaboration with many partners over long distance requires a good communication infrastructure. Those involved need to be able to show what they are doing, and when and where they are doing it, and be able to contact those who are doing similar things. This is the ambition behind the online Platform.
