On October 18th at 15:00 - 16:00 CEST we had a pleasure to run the fourth event by the Municipality of The Hague and Placemaking Europe in our City Network collaboration on: ‘Placemaking for public innovation - strategies to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles’. 

The City Network is based on the shared principle to incorporate placemaking into citywide strategies in order to bring out better quality of life with and for inhabitants. We are very excited to be growing this network with a fourth event which will focus on strategies that help overcome tedious bureaucratic "paperwork" and create accessible processes that support citizens to advocate for their needs in the public realm. 

The session on October 18th aimed to explore innovative best practices for integrating placemaking into municipal frameworks and to dive into methods that enable public space users to drive their own changes in public space. The session was inspired by the concept of creative bureaucracy and aimed to explore how placemaking can work as a tool to promote public innovation and enable change that is inspired by and responsive to the current needs of residents. 

The international part of the session featured Tommi Laitio, former City of Helsinki’s Executive Director for Culture and Leisure and the first public sector leader in the world to be offered a two-year fellowship from the new Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University. Tommi Laitio has led the development of Helsinki's citizen engagement model, chaired the Helsinki Health and Wellbeing Steering Group and is a recognised leader and speaker on youth policy, arts and culture, social innovation and diversity.

The city of The Hague presented its 'breakthrough plan' project, which creatively seeks housing solutions for specific target groups: caretakers and asylum seekers with a residence permit. Matthijs van Muijen, policy advisor of the Department of Housing in The Hague since 2020, told us about two projects - Leeghwaterplein and Willem Drees Home, where temporary housing and shared spaces are created for and with those who need them most.

Daniel Radai, Deputy Mayor for Urban Development in Budapest's 8th district, presented projects from Budapest that allow residents to "adopt" public space and what lessons have been learned from the first stages of this practice. He discussed how this strengthens ownership of space, facilitates community building and ensures that individual processes become part of a sectoral norm.

You can watch the full recording from the session on our YouTube channel -  here is the link!