The societal crises of ecological collapse and inequality require bold collective action. Yet the foundations of collective action are shaking; trust in government and institutions has eroded. It is at the scale of cities and communities that legitimacy can be rebuilt. And it is at the scale of cities that solutions to complex crises and new possibilities can be imagined, created, tested and implemented.
There is a need for new hybrid labs that span across sectors and have the capacity for strategic, participatory experiments: experiments that test both technology and regulation; experiments created with and governed by people from every sector; experiments that rebuild trust and reveal transition pathways.
After supporting the City of Montreal in designing a next generation of hybrid civic innovation lab with regulatory experimentation capacity, Dark Matter Labs worked with a group of partners around the broader case for regulatory experimentation to build civic legitimacy in the document Legitimacities Issue #1 and its Quayside Addendum. A first cohort of cities with supporting partners is also in the making.
