Plato: Digital tools for participatory placemaking
| Reference number | |
| Coordinator | SenseStack AB |
| Funding from Vinnova | SEK 1 928 973 |
| Project duration | April 2020 - June 2021 |
| Status | Completed |
| Venture | Civic tech |
| Call | Civic tech: Digital services for enhanced trust between citizens and the public sector |
Purpose and goal
Plato started with the realization that civil society can create third places in the city, co-creative by citizens for citizens. To prevent places like these to fall victim to the relentless jaws of urban instrumentalization, they need better tools to communicate their project, values, and processes. The goal of Plato is to provide grassroots digital tools for planning, decision-making, and budgeting that are suitable for co-creation and self-organization.
Expected results and effects
Through Plato, co-creative and self-organizing groups become more transparent with their decision-making processes, projects,https://platoproject.org/ and values and can thus gain the trust of the public and private sector. A direct outcome of the project was that Blivande received support from the City of Stockholm to distribute money to its own projects through Plato. Today, Plato is used by a dozen organizations around Europe and the tools will be launched publicly in the autumn of 2021.
Planned approach and implementation
Platforms for citizen participation in the urban space are usually developed with municipal decision-making processes in mind, and are rarely suitable for grassroots-driven placemaking initiatives. Civil society rarely has the resources required to develop its own services, and it is unusual for independent cultural centers to develop their own digital tools. With Plato, we have challenged this paradigm and shown an alternative path, where the participants´ ideas, work and implementation comes first.