An a-political movement to increase citizens’ participation and political transparency.
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Alternative Democratic Models
People’s participation
Access to Power Structures
Innovation on organization
diffuse competence
Design methods to generate ideas
Participatory design
Institutional Capacity
Cultural Vibe
Social Activism
prototyping / testing phase
full implementation and development phase
WIJ Delfshaven is an a-political movement or network of self-organised neighbours that promote collaborative initiatives to build a better society from a bottom-up process. Their aim is to bring power back and a voice to the citizens of Rotterdam, increasing participation and political transparency. WIJ was founded in 2013 with the ultimate objective of facilitating more “direct democracy” in the district of Rotterdam (Delfshaven). “Politics is too important to leave it to politicians” was the slogan at that time. This implied that local citizens are the most knowledgeable people about their neighbourhood’s real needs, and by working together they can increase the collective value of the neighbourhood itself. Some points in the program were: inclusiveness, circular sustainability, and offering a strong local participatory democracy.
At the recent elections, WIJ won two parliamentary seats in the local municipality of Delfshaven (400 votes). Interestingly, the initiative has expanded to other neighbourhoods in Rotterdam, e.g. in Rotterdam-Nord and Rotterdam-Kralingen. WIJ has successfully grown and established itself as the a-political option of Rotterdam’s political ecosystem. It is therefore a social innovation movement in its development stage, fully embedded in the urban context and with some evident scalability potential.
The initiative obviously tackles distrust in political processes: citizens often don’t feel involved with their own local politics (for example the municipal elections). With WIJ they want to create more compassion, empathy and collaboration, and by doing this they want to create more involvement with your own neighbourhood. This will create a more direct democracy where citizens can participate directly. The program of WIJ only has one main agenda point: more direct democracy. Citizens in the neighbourhood are invited to suggest the point that they find important to complete the election program.
The distrust towards politics is a problem that doesn’t only occur in Rotterdam, but in other parts of the Netherlands as well, and possibly in the rest of Europe too. In Rotterdam the local political system is arranged in such a way that there are local district committees that can advise the city council about the specific district when asked for, or when they feel like they need to. The idea of WIJ has also been used by other citizens in other neighbourhoods. For example, in ‘Noord’ (Northern Rotterdam) a WIJ initiative was started a few years later. WIJ Noord now also has met the electoral threshold and is now in the district committee with two representatives.
Web: https://wijdelfshaven.nl/index.php
Domain of actions
Description of the solution space.
Object of Innovation
Description of the main focus of innovation: product/service, process, market and/or organization.
Design Competence
Description of the involved design competence.
Design Methods
Description of the design approaches used throughout the project.
Relation to the Urbanscape
Description of the urbanscape relevant to the project.
Project Development Phase
Description of the current phase in the project process.
