Designing Collective Empowerment to Support Bottom-Up City-Making

Ben A. M. Schouten, Gwen Klerks, Silvia Cazacu-Bucica

In this article, we discuss the role of (local) communities in city-making efforts and present a framework supporting the process of civic empowerment. This framework bridges three operational levels of empowerment, the individual, the collective, and the institutional level, with several aspects of an empowerment process. Furthermore, we introduce eight competencies that play an important role in community-based initiatives to address and take ownership of issues of mutual interest. In addition to presenting this framework and its theoretical underpinnings, we showcase two case studies that substantiate and illustrate how our framework informs design for collective empowerment. The framework enables design researchers, volunteers and practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders to analyze civic initiatives at different stages of development, considering the operational context and focusing on the empowerment process as it unfolds.