Unlimited Cities is the free, open-source tool that turns citizen participation into urban transitions.
Built around the In-Situ Collage method. Deployed in more than 30 territories, on four continents, since 2011.
01
Territories worldwide
02
Participants per project
03
Recognition
04
Founding year
Why does citizen participation
in urban planning so often fail?
Four breakdowns documented by academic research and by the municipalities themselves.
01
Lack of representativeness
Attracting a truly diverse cross-section of inhabitants remains a persistent challenge.
02
Public disengagement
Transition issues are complex and disconnected from people’s immediate concerns.
03
Risk of distrust
“Participation”, “co-construction” promise more than the actual room for manoeuvre.
04
Lack of perceived usefulness
Projects unfold over years — contributions seem to disappear into a void.
When participation fails, more than opportunities are lost: it silently undermines the very foundations of democracy.
The In-Situ Collage.
Create on-site. See everyone in real time.
Rather than inviting citizens to meetings, we go where they live. Each person creates an annotated collage directly on the site to be transformed, and every contribution becomes immediately visible to all.
This single shift addresses all four breakdowns at once: representativeness (we go to people), expression (a creative, accessible tool), trust (transparency in real time), and usefulness (collages become the substance of decisions).
Seven phases,
forged in the field.
Adapt them, shorten them, expand them — they belong to you as much as to us.
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01 Get to know the process and the platform -
02 Define a process suited to your territory -
03 Run contributory workshops -
04 Prepare the digital platform -
05 Run digital mediation in public space -
06 Analyse contributions -
07 Restitution & sharing
Ten city projects,
four research evolutions.
More than 30 territories have deployed Unlimited Cities. Fourteen of them are documented in detail — split between real city projects and research-driven evolutions of the tool.
I place enormous hope in Unlimited Cities. It is a means of better conducting democratic debate, with the capacity to reach new layers of the population. Michael Delafosse —
Mayor of Montpellier
(then Deputy Mayor for Urban Planning)
Recognitions
- UN-Habitat
- Several international prizes
- European research programmes
- 30+ partner cities
Open-source from Geneva,
shared everywhere in the world.
Unlimited Cities is carried by the Open Urbanism Foundation, based in Geneva. The tool is co-developed with partner cities and rooted in European urban research.
- Process
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Platform
- GNU AGPLv3