the City
Permissioning the City
Permissioning the City is a community-led system for governing and negotiating the use of urban spaces. Through a new open permissions architecture, it aims to unlock the city's spatial assets for diverse civic uses.
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Context
Traditional regulatory systems like zoning and permits, designed for top-down, static, 20th-century cities, struggle to keep pace with the fluid, dynamic realities of modern urban life. This disconnect results in underutilised spaces, missed opportunities for community use, and diminished urban vibrancy.
Challenge
How can we facilitate flexible, demand-driven use of urban spaces while creating adaptable rules that respond to evolving needs? How can communities leverage local knowledge and lived experiences to uncover and co-create new opportunities for space use? Finally, how can we move beyond private ownership to establish stewardship-based agreements that prioritise care, shared governance, and collective responsibility? These fundamental challenges remain unresolved by current space booking or management systems.
Idea
Permissioning the City and its portfolio of tools introduces a citizen-centered approach to managing spaces, enabling adaptive and evolving rules based on real-world feedback. The platform will open up the city for all kinds of civic activities by granting citizens convenient access to one of the city’s most vital assets — space. Anyone can start running pop-up restaurants, communal libraries, host community auctions, evening lectures and more.
For the first time, citizens will be able to take an active role in co-creating the city’s landscape and restoring its vitality, while the city can benefit from gathering crucial data (around spatial use and human activities) that can be used to develop dynamic regulations and efficient, people-centric urban governance.
Impact
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Permissioning the City will develop and implement protocols that change how institutions and communities interact with urban spaces. By shifting from a centralised governance model to a community-led approach, it will foster habits that prioritise collective stewardship and active participation in urban governance.
The concept promotes democratic digitalisation by leveraging digital tools to enable community-driven governance. This will ensure that decisions about urban space usage are made democratically, reflecting the diverse needs and interests of the community. Through digital tools, citizens will have the opportunity to participate in and influence decision-making processes directly.
DESIGN BRIEF
How can new forms of digital technology: Open Permissions System, location and sensor technology, transform the way our public and private spaces are used in the city?
Unlocking assets
What kind of identity, liability, incentive mechanisms do we need to design to enable decentralized governance of spatial assets?
Layered permission system
How can a layered permission system co-designed with citizens, unlock flexible and diverse uses of space?
Feedback and negotiation
How can we measure new types of data, create new feedback mechanisms and activate peer to peer negotiation?
Use cases
What are the typologies of spaces and contexts that could be activated through this permissions system, what are the use cases?
Compliance and accountability
How can we build new compliance mechanisms that enable agency and autonomy rather than enforcing control?
Data informed governance
How could cities use open data collected through this system to imagine new public services and methods of urban planning and governance?
about us
We are an interdisciplinary, cross-organisational team born out of Dark Matter Labs. In 2021, we began developing the 'Permissioning the City' prototype and proposal as part of the Bloomberg Global Mayors Challenge. In 2024, we received a grant from the National IT Industry Promotion Agency to develop the MVP of Permissioning Engine - an open source tool for community-led governance of spaces.
To learn more about the project, check out our MVP and read our blogs:
Permissioning the City Product Journey
#1 Transitioning from project to product
#2 User journey and scenario building
#3 Are we coding too soon?
Permissioning the City — Unlocking cities’ growing underutilised spatial assets for an emergent civic economy
