“Transformative Cities” is an opportunity for progressive local governments, municipalist coalitions, social movements and civil society organizations to popularize and share their experiences of building solutions to our planet’s systemic economic, social, political and ecological crises.
The initiative draws on the emerging wave of transformative practices and responses taking place at municipal level worldwide, by launching a unique platform and award process that will facilitate the wider dissemination of the lessons and inspiration from such practices. The awareness raising campaign attempts to bring attention to citizen initiated alternatives working to empower communities in the fight for environmental justice and self-organized responses to the climate crisis. There are four categories in the campaign: water, energy, housing and food systems.
Through an open call they have collected 33 initiatives and practices of transformative change from all over the world. These practices have been evaluated by a diverse group of practitioners and experts, and then mapped in the Atlas of Utopias. Three initiatives for each category (water, energy, housing and food systems) have been chosen, adding up to twelve stories in total. Next, the Transformative Cities initiative has commissioned local journalists to dig deep and pull out the people and practices behind these transformative practices. These stories will be published on different international media-outlets, reaching a global audience.
To select the awarded stories, the public will vote on the top twelve initiatives via our website, starting from 10th September and ending on 9th October 2019. The voting page will display all relevant information about the initiatives and provide links to media sources. Although the popular vote will technically identify a series of “winners,” our goal is not to create competition between different political practices, but rather to put a spotlight on diverse transformative practices and encourage their spread internationally.
The winning initiatives from the 4 different categories will be invited to an international conference in Amsterdam on the 4th of December 2019. Stay tuned for more information about this conference that will be live-streamed.
