An Immersive Urban Commons School
Urbánika teaches about the intersection of Web 3.0 and regenerative urban governance.
We are immersive because teaching regenerative urban governance -aka urban commoning practices, is a convivial process. We offer it through an IRL experience taking a group of neighbors sharing a street or block, and guiding them in solving their coordination failures through urban commoning and the use of web3.
Urbánika is the third general iteration of urban commoning exercises and learnings that Humberto Besso Oberto Huerta and other great activists have gone together in the quest of solving local problems that the government nor private companies were able to offer.
If you want to have a quick read about the three iterations, check out this Twitter thread.
Back to web3...If you are into blockchain you may have already envisioned dozens or hundreds of applications that could optimize the way local governance is carried out. But thinking that the people in power will adopt something that will bring more public scrutinity and distribute decision-making back to the citizens, is näive.
So, if governments are not going to adopt better practices, who will?
Well, after several internal testings within the Urbánika project we found out that the only people that currently acknowledge their NEED to improve their coordination game are CONDOMINIUMS.
Condos have the requirement to coordinate in providing and maintaining their own security, parks, streets, drainage, street lights, etc, because they are considered private and thus, out of the public administration.
So they pay a monthly fee to keep things up.
So what?
Well, the only way that neighbors know to keep things up is through an administrative board. This mechanism happens to output the same negative effects that (almost every) local public administration:
Non-transparent use of common resources,
Corruption and incompetence,
Privatizing or giving away shared resources,
Not true representativity due to looking for their own benefit instead of for the common one,
... Do I need to continue?
You might be getting the big picture now...
People living in condos are generally unhappy with the way their fees are managed, that's why there's a growing market of software solutions and even professional condo managers offering their services.
That's where Urbánika comes...
Decentralize city management.
We envision a future where a city is ran by its neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods by their blocks, and each block by the houses forming it.
That could lead to one day be possible to live in a State that is ran by its Municipality DAOs, and each Municipality by its City DAOs, and so on...
Obviously, this requires a cultural, economical, and political shift, it requires an ontological shift. So if you'd like to make it possible support us.
So, now we are preparing the courses for neighborhood coordination, we have already spoken with three neighborhoods of several thousand houses and we have validated the need. They are willing to pay for the experience.
Once the course is ready, we will start with small groups of neighbors sharing a street.
There are two things we are working on at the moment:
🎓The courses,
🚌The school bus
We expect to have the courses ready by the end of the year, and the bus ready by February 2024.
Well, we will go into an experimental journey of offering our experience to neighborhoods across 20 countries of LATAM (check the route here).
The goal is ´providing our learning experience to 80 condos from 40 cities of 20 Latinamerican countries, and from there graduate 800 neighbors.
If you are passionate about self-management, urban planning, peer-governance, urban regeneration, commons-related meme making, video editing, please send us a DM through Twitter.com/0xUrbanika or to humberto.besso@protonmail.com
You can help with your time to accelerate the transition ahead.
If you don't have the time to contribute, but you have some coins you can spare, please, please support us.
Thanks to supporters like you we've created courses on the commons, learning capsules of 1-min long videos, twitter threads.
💖 Please support us with three quick things:
Liking ♥ our project,
Donating to it,
and sharing it wherever you can.
These things will already be doing world-impact.