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 intertwined 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.
With the Transformative Cities Award, we aim to highlight political practices and solutions that can serve as inspiration for others. We aspire to create a new model of awards, which is participatory, inspirational, and rooted in exchange and learning. We envisage a process of knowledge co-creation and practice exchange that leads to an atlas of political practices, whose inspiring stories speed up a process of systemic transformation towards a more democratic, equal, peaceful and resilient world.
This award does not seek to pass judgment on social movements, civil society organizations, citizens platforms or other groups. It is a platform where those acting to transform the world may systematize their successful practices, exchange with and learn from others, and receive increased exposure and outreach. After two successful editions, we are engaged in an ongoing learning process, looking at how to systematize local political practices so we can identify what is working, and help to accelerate the process of transformation.
APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS
The Transformative Cities initiative is open to collectives, not individuals. A collective can have the form of a social movement with recognizable structures and goals- even without a formal legal recognition, a legally existing civil society organization, a citizens’ platform seeking to gain institutional power at municipal and/or city level via a political candidacy, an established city council, or other forms of collective action that center their practices in a specific location that is not generally recognized as a region, state or similar delimitation. The third edition of the award (2020) will look at four issues: Energy, Water and Housing and Food.