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To build our local communities of the future with as much involvement from our own citizens as possible.

Topics

  1. Local democracy
  2. Community building
  3. Social innovation

Main policy issue to be addressed in relation to the selected topics

How do we build local communities together with our citizens? We aim to align government policies with a maximum involvement from our citizens. We will explore this on four levels: 1. What do citizens need to engage in the shaping of their communities? How can we engage new groups (groups that aren’t active in in our traditional town meetings and policy participation efforts)? 2. How do we organise the interaction and dialogue between local government and civil servants on the one hand and citizens and NGO’s on the other? Goal of this interaction is to meet local challenges like spatial planning, aging, sustainable challenges et cetera. 3. How do we learn as a municipality to communicate and interact with our communities, based on equality and role-awareness? 4. How do we adapt the organisation of our municipality to meet these challenges? We are in the process of setting up several lines of practice that suit our different local communities. Examples are: working with a citizen organized initiative booster, on and offline community building, building networks of active citizens, city makers, citizen’s advisory boards and village councils and participatory budgeting. We aim to compare traditional ways of participation and new ways of local democracy tools and compare what works best in which setting. With this information we want to set up our action plan for new ways of local democracy, citizen involvement and community building.

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Useful Information

Alphen aan den Rijn is a midsize (population 107.000) municipality in the center of the Netherlands. Alphen aan den Rijn has a growing economy and population and is facing issues of sustainable development, aging, housing shortage, loneliness, social cohesion. It also has a large amount of active volunteers. The municipality is formed by a city and 7 smaller sized villages. These villages, as well as the different quarters in the city, each have their different character and cultural heritage.

We are looking for partners that like to try different types of local democracy and community building in different local settings, as well as partners that want to learn as a governmental organization how to relate to local democracy. So we look for open cities with daring municipal government and civil servants that are willing to reflect on their own roles.

Last modified:

15 March 2019

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Project Partners
A Lead Partner

Candidate ID

Institution: 
Municipality of Alphen aan den Rijn
City: 
Alphen aan den Rijn
Country: 
Netherlands
Type of region: 
More developed