#1 Transitioning from project to product — Day 1

This blog is the first in a series documenting the Re:Permissioning the City(PtC) product development journey. In the spirit of “working out loud”, the series aims to share our ongoing progress, learnings, and reflections on building a digital permissioning system designed to unlock underutilised spaces in the city for civic use, through introducing participatory and distributed forms of spatial governance.

In June 2024, we received good news from one of the many applications we submitted to develop the Re:Permissioning the City platform. This specific grant awarded by the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) of South Korea, allowed us to spend the next 5 months developing the first digital prototype. Having spent the last 3 years developing the concept through small research grants, we were overjoyed to finally have the opportunity to start building something tangible.

Once we assembled the team, composed of three developers, a graphic designer, and four strategic designers, we gathered in London for a week-long workshop. Looking back, it was an ambitious, high-stakes plan that required turning theory into a concrete product design in a matter of 5 days. We were betting on our combined ‘collective intelligence’ to figure out this challenge together.

Day 1: Defining the problem space and scope of our intervention

Like any ‘design & innovation’ project, we started by collectively defining and narrowing down our area of intervention. We did this through discussing the problem space, our objectives and value proposition, and through defining the various ‘horizons’ of the product we were setting out to build.

Problem space

• Fairness in allocation of spaces: in the case of Daegu and other public/government-owned spaces, the current process for allocating shared spaces is seen as unfair. For example, a simple first-come-first-served approach often fails to prevent hoarding of use rights (whoever has more resources to submit applications has a higher chance of gaining rights). Seen in the case of the public square in front of Seoul City Hall where right-wing Christian groups deliberately submit applications ahead of LGBTQI+ organisations to prevent them from hosting the queer festival, existing rules can be abused to discriminate against certain groups, which challenges fairness and ethics of existing governance models.
• Fairness in decision-making: existing governance around spaces are centralised and opaque. Either controlled directly by space owners, or rules set by intermediary organisations entrusted to manage spaces. Ordinary ‘users’ of spaces and other stakeholders (neighbours and others who have a stake) are almost always excluded from the rule-making and permissioning process.
• Public value captured in private wealth: we challenge rent-seeking, private ownership models, where 1) public spaces are used to generate private wealth or 2) value generated by the public e.g. rehabilitation through community activities gets captured solely by land/space owners. The focus is on ensuring that public spaces are used in a way that benefits the community rather than being a source of income for private entities.
• Decision-making based on individual interests: we advocate for a decentralised commons-based approach to decision-making. The use of spaces in the city is rarely a concern for the property owner alone. Rather, how spaces are used will affect third parties in positive and negative ways, and also the health of the city as a collective whole. This means decisions on how spaces are used should be made collectively, considering the public or commons’ good rather than individual or organisational interests. The idea is to create a system where the use of space benefits the broader community.
• Underutilisation of spaces: the current approach to managing public spaces is bureaucratic, which creates barriers to access and results in underutilisation. Even when spaces are managed by single entities (often NGOs and civil society organisations with a specific mandate), it takes a lot of resources to maximise utilisation, costs they often cannot afford.
• Barriers to access: it’s not easy for the average citizen to find spaces to do stuff — often, spaces are hard to find (no central database), and then there are restrictions on types of use which can be difficult to navigate.
• Rules are restrictive: existing rules around spaces (what you can do and not do) tend to be overly conservative, geared towards preventing potential conflicts. When people want to ask for bespoke permissions (if their activity does not fit into existing types of use), existing booking systems lack processes to easily process these requests, instead reverting to ad-hoc, off-platform negotiation (or outright rejection). We need different kinds of rules and methods of negotiation that can ‘liberate’ spatial use, to accommodate more flexible and creative uses of space.

Hypothesis

Our hypothesis is that creating a system that enables easier (and democratic) access to public space for communities will remove barriers for people wanting to organise activities that generate social/cultural capital and public value. This will result in increased civic activity in a city (especially key for cities experiencing demographic/economic/social decline), which has broader societal benefits (reduced isolation, better mental health, less division).

How is what we are building different from conventional booking systems? Why is this way of doing things better?

• Democratic: it opens up decision-making/rule-making around shared spaces to a wider range of stakeholders, and by encouraging peer review/approval process, contributes to building democratic capacities.
• Legitimacy and consent: peer reviewed permission process allows us to gather people’s consent for activities that might not have been possible before. The net effect is that more events can happen in the city (with legitimacy) because we have a more effective way of revealing and implementing the views of the population.
• Mission-driven: allowing space owners and citizens to make social impact easier rather than just maximising profit from rent-seeking activities.
• Power distribution and liability sharing: liability and power are interlinked, which means if you have skin in the game, you get to participate in decision-making. The idea is to transition away from ‘externalities’, where negative impacts of an individual’s decisions can be displaced onto the commons.
• Open source: we are building an interoperable open source tool that people can fork and integrate into their existing systems.
• Distribution of value: financial value derived from a space (e.g. increase of property prices) is often hoarded by land/space owners. We will try to measure non-financial value generated from civic activities, as well as distribute financial value across more stakeholders.

Horizons scoping

Typically, product teams will create a product roadmap. However, we decided to take a different approach, coming from a strategic design perspective. The key difference between a product roadmap and horizons scoping is that the former is execution focused, while the latter is focused on identifying and assessing different “horizons” or stages of future opportunities, challenges, and strategic goals over a longer period of time. In practice, we adapted elements of both — focusing on describing the hypotheses we wanted to test, while leaving room for uncertainty and more radical imaginations in Horizon 3 as an intended direction of travel.

Horizon 0 reflects the status quo, Horizon 1 is the scope which is narrowed down considerably to fit the timeline and expectations of the 2024 prototype grant. Horizon 2 reflects what we aim to build as the first full product released to the public, and finally Horizon 3 is a description of where our ambitions lie in the future. What we managed to map out during the workshop is in no way complete — in fact the process of mapping alerted us to critical gaps, such as the question of business models and incentive mechanisms, all of which will need to be defined further. But we share this as a snapshot of our thinking at stage 1 of the development journey.

Read Day 2: User journey and scenario building

This blog was written by Eunsoo Lee in conversation with the core team of Permissioning the City and utilising the records of the workshop.

Team members who contributed to the workshop (in alphabetical order):
Calvin Po, Donghun Ohn, Eunji Kang, Eunsoo Lee, Fang-Jui ‘Fang-Raye’ Chang, Hyojeong Lee, Shuyang Lin, Theo Campbell

Wider advisory group:
Indy Johar, Hee Dae Kim, Gurden Batra, Charlie Fisher

Partners and funders:
NIPA(National IT Industry Promotion Agency), P4NE(Partners for a New Economy), Parti