Transforming market spaces together
UrbanCommunity Experiment Recap (Yenimahalle Municipality Turkey)
Roof Coliving is a social enterprise that develops models to create inclusive, participatory, and innovative approaches by using civic involvement in their works. We collaborate with local authorities and citizens to co-create participatory solutions to the issues on their agenda. In this way, we also activate collective intelligence, create a collective impact, and strengthen social innovation approaches in the public sector. We have carried out placemaking activities with more than 2000 citizens every year, with 20 municipalities in 11 different cities in Turkey and abroad. We keep civic engagement and participation at the core of our placemaking works. In our practices, we embrace creative methods in bottom-up processes as an alternative to traditional participation practices.
Our collaboration with Yenimahalle Municipality on the ICLEI-founded Çarşı-Pazar project addressed the critical need to address market vendors’ working conditions and food waste for a just transition, we aimed to transform market areas into safe, inclusive spaces while implementing innovative waste management and design strategies. We organized participatory design and on-site research with market vendors, and customers, in collaboration with Yenimahalle Municipality, Istasyon TEDU, and the Marketers Tradesmen Chamber.
By focusing on the aspect of our collaboration with Yenimahalle Municipality, we observed that engaging with municipal officials who are open to innovation and have a forward-thinking mentality is necessary to create trusting, collaborative relationships and drive projects forward. This interaction is reciprocally beneficial for both local governments and CLIs. Those bottom-up, participatory design approaches for implementing spatial projects help reduce costs of possible risks and ensure long-term usability. Local governments must remain accountable for their promises beyond election periods to fulfill commitments that benefit all citizens and build trust. Citizen-led initiatives can facilitate dialogue, addressing concerns and gathering insights, particularly for community-specific projects like marketplaces.
This blog was written by our UrbanCommunity experimenter Sıla Kartal, with light editing from us. It is part of a series of narrative reports on how the experimenters have used the UrbanCommunity micro-funds to collaborate with their local government towards sustainable and just cities.
