In Open Source Urbanism (OSU) citizens self-organize and create Do-It-Yourself (DIY) urban designs to address societal problems. Self-organized citizens develop these designs, but there is no support for the design process based on the co-creation and involvement of citizens. The latter are mainly non-experts. Three aspects characterize OSU: (1) OSU initiatives are initialized by citizens; (2) OSU initiatives are the new commons, are collectively created and managed by self-organized citizens; (3) to last, DIY should be accepted by or co-produced with the authorities as they can change the urban environment. This research offers a set of design principles to guide the cultivation of OSU infrastructures in the self-organized setting of urban commons. We derived the principles from an ethnographic study of an Amsterdam-based citizen initiative. This paper offers a set of design principles to guide the cultivation of OSU infrastructures in the self-organized setting of the urban commons. We introduce eight design principles: (1) Co-creation, (2) Trust-building, (3) Motivating, (4) Growing, (5) Showcasing, (6) Bridging, (7) Open-sourcing, and (8) Peer Production. By promoting self-organized, community-led development, our design principles offer guidelines for urban commons communities, academics, and decision-makers to work towards a shared vision of the future of inclusive cities. Building trust and gaining access to expertise are key aspects of OSU cultivation.

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Open Source Urbanism (OSU) emerges as citizens self-organise to alter their urban environments by creating Do-It-Yourself (DIY) urban prototypes and sharing their design manuals on the internet. The examples of urban prototypes might vary from built structures, such as street furniture and urban gardening equipment, to decentralised energy designs and IT artefacts. They emerge as a natural response of citizens to perceived problems in their urban environments. Urban prototypes are designed, paid for, and implemented by self-organised citizens instead of developed by public or private companies and bought on the market. Whereas companies’ staff consist commonly of professionals, and the products are thoroughly tested and standardised to comply with all possible governmental regulations, urban prototypes are incomplete, as they embody the ongoing experimentation of citizens with their urban environments. Furthermore, amateur designers might have limited experience or background in this area. @en

The concept of the smart city increasingly being used but is in fact an umbrella topic covering several disciplines and domains. In the current literature is no agreement on a comprehensive vision of the smart city; perspectives on it vary from purely technological urban development to initiatives addressing societal challenges. We argue that in these perspectives, self-governance is often ignored, yet plays an important role in the smart city idea, bringing together people, technologies, and policies. The objective of this chapter is to provide a framework for the classification of self-governance initiatives on a community level. The framework unites heterogeneous urban initiatives giving a broader understanding of existing self-governance practices that could be used within the smart city.@en

Citizens interested in the democratization of urban development processes experiment with the co-creation of public spaces. Some of them collect, improve, and share design blueprints and manuals of their projects on the internet with help of free and open source tools. As a result, they produce open source design manuals that can be used freely, modified, and developed further. However, such attempts at opening urban design are still uncoordinated, atomized, and dispersed, and therefore fail to create the value that a more concerted effort might. We argue that open source urbanism practices would benefit from open design platforms that are purposefully designed for the complex domain of urbanism. As a first step, this paper identifies the requirements that such platform should meet. As there are currently no examples of such a platform, we analyze the platforms that are there and partially satisfy the demand to extract the shared underlying requirements @en