Join the co-creation of the Wiki on Sustainable Just Cities

You can use the wiki as a resource but also for sharing your knowledge and experience

The Wiki on Sustainable Just Cities brings together knowledge needed to create sustainable and just cities. It’s a collaborative endeavour which we invite you to join.

To help you in the process our 21st April online UrbanA Community Conversation will explore the practicalities of how to Wiki.

In order to transform our cities into more sustainable and just environments, we need knowledge that is relevant and accessible to as many people as possible. Currently, too much knowledge remains fragmented and inaccessible. Through the UrbanA project, we aim to bring together existing knowledge and to develop and translate it into action.

This Wiki is a key part of our work, building a knowledge commons that serves as a resource for everyone who wants to make our cities better and fairer places to live. You can use it as a resource, but also as a means of sharing your own knowledge and experience.

Currently, the Wiki contains:

• approaches to sustainable & just cities (methods, tools, concepts, perspectives) — ranging from community gardens and Transition Towns to democratic governance and financial mechanisms
• projects & initiatives working on sustainable & just cities
• user profiles of people working on sustainable & just cities and using this Wiki
• a database on Sustainable Just Cities & Corvid-19

You are warmly invited to edit and adapt any of the current pages by, for instance, adding examples, correcting or complementing information. You are also welcome to add your own approaches, projects, initiatives and user profiles. We provide templates but they are optional: you can also design your own structure.

Becoming a Wiki-user is very easy and quick. See below.

Why a Wiki (and what is)?

A Wiki is a decentralized approach to knowledge co-creation and information sharing. The ‘wisdom of the crowd’ is in the lead (instead of top-down development by a central manager). It supports inclusive, co-creative, open access and open source approaches to knowledge generation.

We use MediaWiki, an open source knowledge management platform initially developed by The Wikimedia Foundation as the architecture for Wikipedia. This is now one of the best-supported and best-known wiki platforms available, as well as one the most exemplary models of an open and self-organizing community. It facilitates a collaborative way of working as users can modify and structure content directly from their web browser without the need for special software.

What’s next & who owns the UrbanA Wiki?

The idea of a knowledge commons is that it is owned and governed by all of those who use it. The moment you make your user-profile and edit or add something in the UrbanA Wiki, you become a co-owner and maker of the Wiki.

So far, the Wiki on Sustainable Just Cities has been coordinated, designed and hosted by the consortium members of the UrbanA project. UrbanA will continue to host, use and feed the Wiki until at least December 2021. In addition to information on approaches, projects and initiatives, UrbanA will continue to add information on drivers of injustice, governance interventions and policy insights for sustainable and just cities.

More importantly, UrbanA will continue to host and facilitate a wider Community of Practice, including you, to co-create this living knowledge database. It is our explicit aim for the Wiki on Sustainable Just Cities to live on after the UrbanA project, either as a stand alone database on sustainable & just cities, or — at the very least — to be integrated into another platform (e.g. the Communities for Future Wiki hosted by ECOLISE; the European network for community-led initiatives on sustainability and climate change.)

How can you become part of the UrbanA Wiki?

Becoming a Wiki-user is very easy and quick — just follow the steps below.

5 easy steps to becoming a Wiki user:

1. Send an email to tom.henfrey@ecolise.eu to ask for an account and password
2. Create your user profile. You can find a user template here (optional).
3. Comment on existing wiki pages
4. When you are ready…start editing wiki-pages
5. If you are feeling really brave: create new pages on approaches, projects and/or initiatives

And don’t forget to join the Webinar

Remember to join us for the UrbanA Community Conversation on the Wiki: Co-creating knowledge commons 21st of April 2020, 15:00–16:30 CEST