Re:Permissioning the City

Unlocking cities’ growing underutilised spatial assets for an emergent civic economy

2021–

Partners
Daegu Metropolitan City
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Daegu Technopark

Re:Permissioning the City is a community-led governance and permissions system which interrogates how we use, manage and share urban space. It takes as a starting point the numerous vacant and underutilised spaces that opened up due to the pandemic and larger demographic and industrial restructuring, with the intention to aggregate and unlock them for civic uses.

Core to this concept is the light-touch, flexible, and multi-use planning approach by the local government that permits community-driven, creative appropriation of space. Enabling this new capacity of the city is a new governance model operated through a digital system that facilitates autonomous decision-making around when and how a space can be used, for what and by whom.

Re:Permissioning the City project began under the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge 2021, in partnership with Daegu Metropolitan City in South Korea. With the upcoming pilot in Daegu, we are concurrently looking for new partners around the world to develop and test this further.