I said that Open Source and Peer-to-Peer could be applied to design for a locality…and Matías Echanove and Rahul Srivastavache are trying to adapt the principles of the Bazaar described by Eric Raymond to urban planning.

1. Necessity is the mother of invention: What do residents need? It is not for planners to guess, but for them to say.
2. No need to reinvent the wheel again: Lets see what works in here and elsewhere and expand on it.
3. You don’t really understand the problem until after you start implementing the solutions: It doesn’t have to be an all out “redevelopment”, we can start small and keep building knowledge from that.
4. With the right attitude interesting (and unexpected) issues will come up and make the plan & development better.
5. Letting go: Lets not feel proprietary about the plan, or rather let other people feel proprietary about it as well. Our common goal is to have the BEST/optimal solution, and everyone has something to contribute.
6. Residents should be co-planners and co-developers: They are the biggest assets of planners and a lot of time and attention should be spent to cultivate their active participation. We don’t need to be design or planning genius, but rather to find the best way to activate the collective intelligence of the residents.
7. The plan should be publicly accessible on the web and in the planned area itself: with updates every weeks so people are part of it and can react immediately. Listen to what people (everybody) have to say and immediately incorporate it. It can always been modified along the way.
8. If we have enough people looking at different aspects of the plan, any issue can be recognized and addressed quickly: Finding the issues is the biggest challenge. Once we found it someone will have an idea about how to solve it.
9. Finding an efficient way to get people’s input is more important than input itself.
10. If residents are treated as the most valuable resource of the plan, they will become the most valuable resource of the plan.
11. Being able to recognize good ideas from others is (almost) better than having good ideas oneself.
12. Realizing that our concepts are wrong might lead to the most striking and innovative solutions.

Por otra parte, dado que gestionar ciudades y territorios consiste en realidad en gestionar personas, es si cabe más importante que en el caso del software que el proceso se desarrolle de un modo colaborativo dando participación a los propios usuarios que de este modo pueden convertirse en actores del proceso. Ciertamente, la planificación actual, por ejemplo en España, está muy alejada de estas ideas, pero deberíamos pensar por las razones de esta discrepancia. Posiblemente estén más en los fallos del sistema actual que en la supuesta utopía del paradigma del bazar.
(via | Juan Freire)

Tags: City, City Planning, Open Source