STADTMACHER

Stadtmacher about themselves:

Idea

Stadtmacher is a platform for citizens’ projects. On stadtmacher.org you can post project ideas for your city that we develop and bring towards realisation together with the use of two means. The first mean is the expert advice, and the second is the crowdfunding platform, developed specifically for urban development projects and enabling to raise necessary resources for the whole project or its separate phases. Stadtmacher takes on the rising need and desire of people to shape their city themselves. Many citizens have very concrete ideas on how they want to change their environment or city, but often they lack necessary resources to make their projects feasible. Urban development projects need primarily four resources: political approval, legal know-how, planning expertise and money. Stadtmacher helps people to get access to these resources and turns the citizens into independent project developers on a micro level.

Team

Stadtmacher is driven by a team of experienced urban planners and activists. As a spin-off of the citizens’ think-tank Nexthamburg, the Stadtmacher team activates its rich experience of creating and running local crowdsourcing platforms for urban development projects in diverse places – in Germany and internationally. Stadtmacher masters the co-creation approach, on which Nexthamburg has been experimenting from 2009, but on a new level, as now it focuses on the joint work towards realisation of citizens’ projects. Thereby all relevant actors should be involved in the project development – citizens, experts, economy as well as politics and administration. Stadtmacher is a pilot project of the German National Urban Development Policy in the field “Urban Development and Economy”.

Where can i find Stadtmacher?

From its start in 2014, Stadtmacher acts in four cities:
In Hamburg, as a complementary platform for the Nexthamburg-process
In Kassel, as a complementary platform for the Nextkassel-process
In Mönchengladbach, within the Masterplan MG 3.0
In Heidelberg, as a part of the IBA’s (International Building Exhibition) call for projects IBA Heidelberg
In these four cities we want to test and improve the Stadtmacher tools. From 2015, Stadtmacher can be activated in other cities also. The necessary prerequisite is the formation of a local team, that takes over networking with actors from politics and administration, economy and civil society.