City making, civic tech and urban transformations ? - Taiwan experience

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While population keeps growing, more and more people lives in urban areas. Taiwan knows this social phenomenon. The pandemic situation and before climate change already proves that it's crucial that cities reconnect with local territories. Urban renew and urban development might improve with citizen’s involvement. We believe citizen’s involvement and transparency are conditions for better urban policies.

In Taiwan, we had opportunity to be part of few projects involving citizens while using a civic tech « unlimited cities Diy ». The APP is open source and made by a NGO called 7 billion urbanists. It allows people to easily design public space with photo realistic features. We also had opportunity to be part of a team in the presidential Hackathon 2020 (patch by planting – 台灣號直地). This team is made from many other people from different backgrounds. This experience forced us to rethink about possibilities and limits of this kind of citizen involvement methodology to simply invite people to think about planting trees.

In this talk we would like to share our experience in Taiwan, including the few cases we have been part. We will introduce briefly the idea behind the APP unlimited cities, why we think it has been successful in some case and why not in others case.