The Wiki on Sustainable Just Cities brings together knowledge to create urban environments that are more sustainable and just. The current COVID-19 crisis, once again, shows the needs for this. This is a collaborative endeavour which you are invited to join!
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. The UrbanA project aims to broker and synthesise actionable knowledge on and for sustainable and just cities, by building a knowledge commons that serves as a resource for everyone who wants to make our cities better and fairer places to live. This Wiki is a key part of this endeavour. You can use it as a resource, but also as a means of sharing your own knowledge and experience.
Co-creating a Wiki on Sustainable & Just Cities
Currently, the Wiki primarily features approaches to sustainable & just cities (methods, tools, concepts, perspectives), ranging from community gardens and Transition Towns to democratic governance and financial mechanisms. Furthermore, the Wiki aspires to also collect projects & initiatives working on sustainable & just cities and user profiles of people working on sustainable & just cities. Recently, we also added a database on Sustainable Just Cities & Corvid-19.
In this call for co-creation, we are calling upon you to become part of this knowledge commons. 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 of 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.
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:
- Send an email to tom.henfrey@ecolise.eu to ask for an account and password
- Create your user profile. You can find a user template here (optional).
- Comment on existing wiki pages
- When you are ready…start editing wiki-pages
- If you are feeling really brave: create new pages on approaches, projects and/or initiatives
In the coming months, the UrbanA project will organise several webinars and other events, including instructions on how to Wiki. If you want to stay up to date you can sign up here.
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