EngagingCities

Location: Nationwide

Website: www.engagingcities.com

EngagingCities is an online magazine that shares creative strategies and new technologies to foster public engagement for livable communities.

How could cities be improved if they were shaped by citizens with the help of experts -- instead of being planned by the experts and handed to citizens as a finished product?

EngagingCities is a gathering place for exploring the ideas and tools that are empowering people to become part of the creative process of planning for better communities.

Our goal at Engaging Cities is simple: to inspire urban planners, architects, developers, educators, economists, and policy makers to apply new approaches and technologies in ways that make our communities more participatory, collaborative, and effective. We highlight new online tools and examine how they can be used in the emerging culture of citizen participation and engagement. We also explore low-tech, high-impact strategies for community involvement.

Every day, new projects and developments across the globe demonstrate creative ways for including citizens in the shaping of places. EngagingCities is where you can follow and become part of this movement.

We think that the rise of interactive web-based technologies is going to profoundly remake our cities – large and small, across the world. We believe open source principles -- collaboration, openness, transparency -- will influence how urban development happens, and we think that community professionals need to learn new ways to meet their responsibilities in communities that depend more and more on those tools – and those expectations. By sharing, leading discussions and helping people explore innovative community engagement strategies, we want to help shape the discussion about the future of our places and how to use these tools and expectations.

Behind EngagingCities is a dedicated group of professionals and contributors with a commitment to helping planners, architects, local officials and communities utilize innovative online and mobile tools to spark interaction and engagement within planning processes.

Chris Haller, EngagingCities’ Publisher, is the CEO of Urban Interactive Studio and CommonSights. UIS provides a suite of outreach strategies and tools to communities across the world, including the EngagingPlans engagement platform, the FlipSides public engagement games, and several others. A longtime leader in the development of online public engagement tools and strategies, Chris lives in Denver, Colorado.

Della Rucker, EngagingCities’ Managing Editor, is Principal of the Wise Economy Workshop, a consulting firm and conversation-provoker in the fields of economic revitalization and public engagement. In addition to her work with Engaging Cities, Della also produces a blog and a podcast, both of which are available at wiseeconomy.com. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

We are always looking for people who want to tell stories about innovative ways to help community professionals and residents take charge of their community’s future. We are looking for research, ideas, experiments, and successes of engaging planning, and we hope you will help us raise awareness across the globe about how citizens and professionals can work together to make our places truly great.