2023 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

17th Edition

Phase 6 of 7

Publication Preparation 18/09/2023 - 06/11/2023

Process phases

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Cascais: Reinvent your neighborhood

Official proposal

01/06/2023 17:35

The Municipality of Cascais has been making a significant investment in the development of participation mechanisms, some of which have significant national and international recognition. The multiplication and diversification of community involvement devices led the Municipality to change its structure, enshrining a specialized team in the design and implementation of participatory processes and the creation of a Municipal Participation System.

This system organizes the different forms of civic participation, placing people at the center, allowing them to decide the ways in which they intend to exercise their citizenship.

The pandemic situation came to emphasize and make more evident the need to develop close relationships, at a time when we were required to distance ourselves, between people and their relationship with the public space and with the territory. It was also a moment that gave the opportunity to meet and live with the neighbors.

Through the Reinvent your Neighborhood program, still in its 1st edition, we intend to meet the vision that cities belong to people and are increasingly designed, planned and built with the people who inhabit them, providing resources for the implementation of projects co-created by groups of neighboring citizens with the aim of improving the area where they live, study or work and the experience of that territory.

Of the twelve applications, nine projects were selected that have been developed involving the municipality, the four parishes, which represent the local government, four teams of consultants with experience in tactical urbanism and other partners who joined each project, such as, for example, schools, associations, clubs, restaurants, study centers, commerce, etc.

The nine ongoing projects cover the four parishes of the municipality, of a different nature, but contributing to the same community objective, namely:

Quintal da Esperança - to reclassify a piece of land to promote coexistence for residents;
Dynamization of Murches - use of public spaces to gather the community around intergenerational activities;
Rede Rotas Vivas - create an ecological corridor along the Ribeira, to visit, create leisure, learning and useful itineraries;
Bairro da Torre - guided tours of the neighborhood to the urban art gallery, enhancing the reinvented common spaces with gastronomic sharing;
Todos ao Bairro - active involvement of the community, through shared dynamics of social, cultural, sporting and environmental activation;
Improvement of our neighborhood - involving children as leaders in the research process involving traders, moderators, identifying problems / weaknesses to create an intergenerational space and a territorial identity;
Jardim das Codornizes – a group of expatriates came together to provide an area for socializing and sharing experiences, where children and adults can play freely in contact with nature;
Exchange of Knowledge and Actions - to create synergies in the community, in order to make it more self-sustainable, dynamic and collaborative, through the exchange of knowledge and actions among members of the neighborhood;
Books on the Wall - create a meeting space from an itinerant/removable library based on books that people offer/exchange.