In search of Real Utopias
The Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award as a research tool
Erick Palomares
12 August 2021
It may seem suspicious, even questionable, that an organization such as the Transnational Institute (TNI), which recognizes the importance that horizontal collaboration has for emancipatory movements as part of social transformation, would propose organizing an award, especially considering the elements of competition and reward that are usually associated with the granting of awards. However, the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award is unlike any other award, as it is a tool for discovering Real Utopias from which to draw lessons. And the best way to understand this is to replace the word “award” with the word “recognition”. Recognition can be understood both as an award—such as when one “recognizes the effort of others”—and as a process of “knowing” or “exploring”—such as when one conducts “a reconnaissance of a terrain”.
These two meanings of the word serve to better explain the use of the award, which we understand as a tool for learning. On the one hand, there is indeed an intention to grant a recognition (in the sense of awarding) to collective initiatives that have succeeded in demonstrating that another world is possible. And to that end, a communication and dissemination effort is made, which is often important for the local administrations, municipal coalitions, social movements, and civil society organizations that participate in the award, because of the legitimacy, prestige, and support that an international recognition lends to their initiatives and the results they obtain.
But it is above all the other dimension—of recognition in the sense of exploration—that is fundamental for understanding the Transformative Cities award and its corresponding Atlas of Utopias, as both are conceived as methodological devices that enable the recognition of social struggles aimed at satisfying certain demands essential for life: water, energy, housing, and food. The main objective of the award is to generate useful knowledge for those who find themselves in the same situation of unfulfillment of these essential demands for survival and who are looking to draw inspiration and lessons from other local contexts.
The Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award is based on the premise that the claim that there are no alternatives to the dominant neoliberal model is false and that the problem lies instead in the diversity, dispersion, and heterogeneity of the many alternatives or “real utopias” underway. Far from subscribing to the “end of utopias” dogma, we believe that political action is about working to create a better future, and that today more than ever we need to reclaim the utopian horizon. But not an idealized and abstract one, rather one that is real, based on outstanding examples from around the world. Such examples are the real utopias defined by Erik Olin Wright, as “utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change.”1
The award, therefore, is an attempt to address the cognitive difficulties that lie in the complexity of making sense of and understanding these real utopias once we try to interpret them from the perspective of another local context, which is by definition both culturally, politically, and economically different. Thus, the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award and the Atlas of Utopias are, above all, learning and communication tools. Its entire design—from the application form and the evaluation criteria to the awarding process and the public dissemination of the initiatives—is aimed at achieving these objectives of learning and disseminating knowledge. In other words, the award is a project that seeks to learn about and, at the same time, disseminate the real utopias that, at the local level, address problems connected with water, food, energy, and housing.
The awards as research tools: Background
The Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award is neither a ranking of cities nor much less is it intended for initiatives to compete against each other. It is a learning tool that is used to try to answer questions from researchers, activists, trade unionists, public policy makers, public officials, members of international or local organizations, and the general public interested in alternatives for the provision of public services, about what can be learned, and how, from a constellation of initiatives implemented in different parts of the world, as well as how to draw inspiration from them. These initiatives demonstrate that through diverse mechanisms, alliances, and processes they have succeeded in socially organizing around concrete demands for water, food, energy, and housing, and achieved the satisfaction of such demands.
But, why organize the granting of an award for this? The use of awards as learning and dissemination tools has been present in academic and institutional discussions for the past three decades, although it has increased with the expansion of Internet and social media use and the global reach of these technologies. The international consensus on their usefulness was confirmed during the discussions for the Millennium Development Goals, which established that there were two key ways or concrete instruments that facilitated the implementation of the goals: the use of indicators and the learning of best practices.2
One of the methods recommended for best practice learning was the use of awards. A number of awards were launched throughout the world by international bodies, such as UN-Habitat and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and prestigious academic institutions, with the aim of, on the one hand, making best practices known by encouraging them to apply for the awards, and, on the other, drawing lessons from the award-winning initiatives.
The Liaison Group for Innovations in Governance and Public Action,3 coordinated by Harvard University, is a clear example of a consensus among academic institutions and international organizations on the usefulness of awards for transferring and learning about best practices. This is due to the diversity and prestige of the academic and research institutions that are members of the group,4 as well as the influence that their theorizing and reflections on the award-winning initiatives have had on the international debate on public policy transfer.5 Examples of this influence can be found in United Nations publications such as the “Guide for the Transfer and Adaptation of Innovations in Governance. Practical Tools and Steps,”6 or the book Replicating What Works,7 where it is possible to recognize that the recommendations for ways to learn about and replicate best practices are drawn from lessons drawn from analyzing the awards under the Liaison Group in different parts of the world.
Now, then, while there is a consensus regarding the usefulness of awards as a research tool, not all awards are the same. We could say that all awards share certain characteristics in terms of “design” but differ substantially in terms of “content”.
To explain what sets the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award apart in terms of content, it might be useful to look briefly at what it has in common with other awards in terms of design.
All awards have three essential features: a distinction or recognition awarded to the winners; a form that award candidates must fill in to apply; and a process of evaluation through which a jury selects the winners based on a series of criteria.
These three common features (an award, an application form, and an evaluation) tell us that all awards involve the same process: first, a call is issued to announce it, which is expected to encourage initiatives to participate; then an application form must be completed in order to participate; and, finally, these forms go through an evaluation process in which a jury applies certain criteria to select the initiatives that best meet those criteria.
The design of the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award includes these three general features, but it has sought to set itself apart from these three stages in its content, by offering an alternative that will allow for a contest that promotes collaboration instead of competition, that does not aim to prove theories but rather seeks to disseminate useful knowledge, and that when evaluating the initiatives does not look for “the best initiative of all” but rather examines all the participating initiatives to identify in each of them the knowledge with the most public value.
The evaluation process for the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award: Toward a collaborative contest
The Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award is designed in such a way as to make each of its components—from the form that must be filled in to the accounts published about the finalists—useful for learning about and potentially replicating the real utopias that will be featured in the Atlas at the end of the process. Although the contexts are different, the underlying assumption is that the technical elements of service provision or the conditions for the fulfillment of a right, as well as the mobilization strategies to secure it, can be transferred to other contexts, or at least serve as inspiration for others in the same circumstances. What follows is a description of how each stage of the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award has attempted to address this tension between the particularity of the context and the learning opportunities that can be derived from the award-winning experiences.
Cycle for 2020
a) The call for the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award
Although it may seem counterintuitive, what is least relevant about the awards as a research and dissemination tool is the award itself. While it is true that the award can influence the behavior of those involved in the initiative by offering incentives,8 the difference—be it in quantity or quality—between awards does not significantly impact the achievement of the learning and dissemination objectives. In fact, an award may involve large sums of money, but lack validity criteria or proper evaluation procedures, so that it would not matter who won: if the competition has not been fair and transparent, the award will lack the legitimacy necessary for the winner to be considered as such by all. And vice versa, if the award is fair and prestigious, winning it will be merit enough.
Therefore, announcing the prize that will be awarded is not what is most important about the call. The most important aspect is defining who is eligible to win it. That is, every call is preceded by a definition of what is considered to merit the award. For example, in the case of the social innovation awards, it is first necessary to define what is understood by social innovation. And that definition is then reflected in the application form, as that form contains the questions regarding the elements that will allow the jury to decide whether or not the initiative meets the criteria.
The Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award differs from the rest in that it does not have nor does it pretend to have or impose an indisputable or universal definition of what a transformative city is. We understand that the future worth fighting for is a world in which many worlds fit, so local particularities, in terms both of culture, history, and political and economic conditions, will tend to mark the differences between the initiatives that are recognized. Therefore, what are awarded are the efforts that are worth observing closely, because it is from them that important lessons can be learned.
In the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award we view cities as a space for fighting for the basic rights necessary to live a decent life. So we understand that the transformative element lies in recognizing that these struggles have managed to articulate a social majority that has been able to reconfigure social relations, correlations of forces, and a sense shared by the majority, expressed both in what is believed possible and in securing it through rights and public institutions.
That does not mean that the award lacks criteria, values, or ideals that we look for in the candidates. We believe that transformative cities will be democratic and feminist in nature, geared toward developing a post-capitalist world; they will be based on non-profit oriented practices sensitive to planetary limits; and they will be built on social empowerment. These practices will have measurable results, as they will have been implemented successfully. And, finally, and very importantly, they will be practices that can be replicated in other regions and places.
Transformation is not conceived as an ultimate end or goal, but rather as a process of transition toward a post-capitalist, feminist, and sustainable future, which will enable the survival of the species in the face of the civilizational disaster brought on by climate change and the inadequate responses offered by capitalism and its latest form—neoliberal financial globalization—or by the other systems that aspire to replace it—multistakeholderism led by transnational corporations or authoritarian and exclusionary nationalism.
That is, the transformation that is sought is a change that is achieved through the reinvention of local politics, in which social organization around concrete demands manages to alter the correlation of forces, so that such demands are met in a fair and democratic way, as universal rights rather than commercial privileges, and whose institutionalization succeeds in disputing the lack of alternatives, presenting an alternative future, the real utopias that are already being implemented.
This is, therefore, one of the main differences between the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award and other awards, as instead of calling for initiatives that meet a previously established definition of what a transformative city is, we seek to learn from a broad and diverse transformation process carried out at the local level around certain concrete demands, which are our award categories, namely, water, food, energy, and housing. We consider these four to be essential demands for the lives of people anywhere on the planet. We could say that together they refer to a political struggle for survival, which makes them necessary and vital for any political community.
Choosing concrete demands as categories for the awards also allows for a comparative analysis between different regions of the world, despite differences in culture, economic contexts, or the scale of local spaces. Access to these basic rights is a universal need. Under the hegemony of neoliberalism, the decentralization of basic services at the local level was promoted, and the privatization of the provision of these services was recommended as part of the structural reforms and the governance model known as new public management.
There are also a couple of strategic components involved in the selection of demands as the unit of analysis. First, the project aims to view the case studies through the lens of Ernesto Laclau’s interpretation of the concept of hegemony developed by Antonio Gramsci, and as a political hypothesis it posits that the articulation of a social majority can be achieved around certain concrete demands. Second, it considers that there is a utopian dimension in the choice of demands as the unit of analysis, as calling for their satisfaction presupposes the firm belief that such satisfaction is possible. There is a demand or claim for something that is lacking; hence the utopian element (an absence or a “no place”). And what makes this struggle a “real utopia” lies precisely in the fact that what was thought impossible in some contexts has become a reality in others. We believe that this motivation to make real what others say is only an abstract and unattainable utopia is a part of any strategy of the struggle for hegemony.
The social struggle for transformation in the material field of service provision is accompanied by a cultural narrative, which confronts the old idea that there is no alternative, so that the struggle consists in affirming that there is an alternative and that it is only not possible because of those who govern. In other words, it is presumed that the state of affairs need not be as it is (it is not natural), and that another state of affairs is possible. That is what is meant by “utopian” thinking.
Thus, the call for award candidates and the questions posed in the application form are not intended to determine who meets a certain definition of transformative city; rather they seek to gather information on real utopias. To that end, two distinct but constituent moments of politics are taken into account: on the one hand, the challenging or destabilizing moment in which citizens take to the streets to call for the satisfaction of certain demands; and, on the other, the constituent or institutional moment, during which the satisfaction of the demand is achieved in a transformative way through community organization, the implementation of public policies, the recognition of certain rights, or the establishment of public institutions or bodies tasked with satisfying that demand.
b) The application form and the research questions
From the above it follows that the most relevant information for achieving the goal of learning and dissemination of knowledge to which the award seeks to contribute will be found in the “Application Form” that the initiatives must fill in to compete. This is the most important instrument for gathering information, since the kind of knowledge that will be disseminated will depend on what is asked there.
As a methodological instrument, the application form is a semi-structured interview, which gathers relevant information for the process of selection of finalists, but above all for the process of learning and transferring knowledge. Each question in the form corresponds to certain aspects that are considered necessary in order to understand and replicate the initiative.
Generally speaking, the form that the initiatives must fill in to be eligible for the award serves two purposes:
- It provides information that the jury needs to be able to evaluate and compare the different initiatives.
- It provides useful information for anyone interested in replicating the initiative in other contexts.
Thus, the questions are designed to obtain information that describes the various elements of the initiative and, at the same time, show clearly and with verifiable evidence that it has succeeded in transforming its environment.
The exercise is not without its difficulties, which range from translating different initiatives into comparable (quantitative) terms to the limited space provided in the forms to describe initiatives that are always complex and diverse in nature (due to history, scale, culture, economy, etc.). The questions posed in the form are small hermeneutic tools, that is, tools to interpret and understand the information, make sense of the different local experiences, translate them so that they can be interpreted in different contexts, and try to express in the same terms initiatives that are essentially different.
To that end, the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award has drawn on different debates conducted in the social sciences, particularly those in the field of public policies, policy transfer, and narrative analysis of public policies, considering very useful the analytical distinction of four stages involved in public policy:9 formulation of the problem; public policy design; implementation; and subsequent evaluation.
Based on this analytical distinction, and with the aim of offering relevant information to government decision-makers, as well as activists, professionals, and citizens in general who participate in the decision-making of projects, we have included different questions in the form, corresponding to the presentation of the problem, the design and implementation of the initiative, the details of its execution in relation to the participation of various stakeholders, as well as the resources used and the results obtained.
We are aware that although the information required in the study of public policies is necessary, it is not enough for social change. Hence our interest in also asking about the kind of strategies used to articulate a social majority and achieving a correlation of forces favorable to the initiative. The form, therefore, poses questions about the different strategies of the social movements and various political actors who have decided to organize as a community, participate in elections, or explore institutional spaces, that is, the so-called “government of social movements.”10
As public problems are by definition complex and exceed the legal boundaries of municipalities, the form asks for references to other laws and public policies at higher administrative levels, whether regional or national. This is because there are certain problems, such as those connected with water in Latin America, that, pursuant to the respective national constitutions, fall under the exclusive competence of municipal governments.11 This does not mean that the municipal government is the only actor involved or the only one that can solve the problem autonomously. Thus, identifying the actors and their roles beyond the local level is also part of the research conducted by the award.
The ultimate objective of the award is without a doubt most explicitly expressed by the form’s last questions, which refer to the lessons learned and what can be shared with others. Serving as inspiration for other initiatives is part of the objective of the award, but it is especially so for its corresponding Atlas of Utopias. What matters is providing useful tools for those wishing to bring about a transformation of their local space. In this sense, the application form is meant to serve as that toolbox, where the different lessons learned in each initiative can be grouped.
Taken together, the questions on the form are accounts that are assembled according to local needs, mosaics that can be examined as a whole or piece by piece. The dissemination of knowledge and possible learning opportunities will depend on the degree in which the recognized initiative responds to the needs, actors, resources, and correlation of forces of those wishing to implement it. In the meantime, with the award we aim to offer information based on our understanding of the current debates on local transformation.
In sum, the application forms12 are a research tool that allows us to contribute empirical and contrasted information regarding, at least, the following issues or areas of public interest:
- Learning about the strategies that have been used during the social mobilization for the satisfaction of certain demands essential for survival; that is, how the initiatives have succeeded in articulating a social majority around the concrete demands for water, energy, housing, and food.
- Identifying the type of institutions that have been created, how the rights for accessing the different demands have been recognized, and the government mechanisms established for satisfying them; or in other words, what new form of governance has emerged from the interaction of social movements and local governments.
- Contributing to the process of knowledge generation and lesson learning, identifying what kind of information may be relevant to those struggling to satisfy the same demands, and how that information can be presented so that it is intelligible despite the cultural and historical differences that characterize the planet’s diverse geographies.
- Participating in the pedagogical process of translation and learning, by offering the information in a disaggregated manner, in different formats and narratives, taking into account that those who participate in local politics are diverse actors, with different approaches, interests, rationalities, ethical or even epistemological assumptions (because to the plurality of contexts we must also add the plurality of actors that characterize this global struggle).
We believe that each of these research questions is well reflected in the application form, thus fulfilling the research and knowledge dissemination objectives that we set for the awards. But it is still necessary to explain how, based on this information, we have managed to create a competition or award, turning the learning objectives into comparable and quantifiable elements to establish a scale to determine the finalists and the winner. To that end, an evaluation process consistent with our objectives was established, which sets the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award apart from other awards.
c) The evaluation process and the jury
The evaluation process—that is, those involved in the evaluation and the criteria applied—is what determines the validity and legitimacy of the recipient of the award, as well as the possibility of replicating it. And it is precisely there—in the evaluation criteria and the members of the jury— that we find the ideological inclinations, the moral values, the political identification, and the assumptions, both ontological and epistemological or theoretical, on which every award is based.
No award can be granted without an evaluation, as that is what all awards are about: comparing and deciding which initiatives are better than others, or which best meet the definition established beforehand. But, as noted above, we do not have—nor do we want to have—a definition of what a transformative city is. Nor do we want to compare initiatives in search of “the best.” How, then, can we compare and recognize some initiatives over others to determine which are the winners?
To solve this difficulty we have availed ourselves of an evaluation form oriented toward learning rather than competing, and of an interdisciplinary jury or evaluators team formed by members from around the world, who through a peer review exercise identify for us which initiatives “are worth learning from,” instead of determining “which of all is the best.”
To give a clear idea of this particular feature of the evaluation process of the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award and the important role of the jury, we like to use a metaphor: if all real utopias that are currently being developed in the world were stars in the sky, the award finalists would be certain constellations focused by a telescope —the Atlas of Utopias—with the aim of observing them up close and understanding them better. There are, no doubt, many more and it is immensely beautiful to see the sky full of stars. But this can also be a problem, as we have neither the time nor the capacity (both physical and cognitive) to look at them all up close at the same time.
We have thus asked a group of people, who are different but equally committed to social change, to help us “calibrate that telescope,” to help us focus on those stars that merit a closer, more thorough look. This group of people constitutes the jury of the award:13 activists, academics, trade unionists, and civil society organizations, both local and international, who after a peer-review exercise, as in scientific journals, recommend the initiatives that “merit a closer look.”
The work of the jury consists in carefully reading the forms to distinguish which initiatives merit publication in the Atlas of Utopias because they offer information that the jury considers valuable and significant enough to be disseminated, thus facilitating the drawing of lessons from them. Therefore, the work of the jury does not consist in deciding which initiative is better or worse in terms of its design or results, but in recognizing and recommending those that offer more and better information for those who struggle to transform their local contexts.
The criteria set out in the evaluation form, which the jury must fill in quantitatively to be able to compare and decide which initiatives are the finalists, correspond to the questions on the application form. And their evaluation refers to how much and what type of information is provided. The assessment focuses on whether other contexts share the problem presented; the degree to which the design and implementation of the initiative answers the questions on the application form regarding the public policy elements; the degree of participation of different stakeholders in the process of development and implementation of the initiative; whether the results can be tangibly verified based on the information provided; and whether the political, cultural, and economic strategies are inspiring and deserve to be known in depth.
At the end of the evaluation process, a quantitative score is given based on the qualitative information assessed by the members of the jury. This makes it possible to numerically rate the initiatives that applied for the award, based on the qualitative information they provided in the application form. In other words, we obtain a quantitative result from a qualitative analysis, striving at all times to subordinate the element of competition typical of awards to the objectives of research and dissemination of knowledge of the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award.
After comparing the results of the evaluation conducted by the members of the jury, three finalists are selected in each category. These three finalists go on to the final round: the People’s Choice Award. In this last stage, the public can vote for their favorite initiative. The winning initiative will thus be the one that receives the highest number of votes from the public. And since the votes are cast online and anyone wishing to do so can participate, the votes come from all over the planet.
The public vote not only allows us to know which are the winning initiatives; it is in itself a strategy for communicating and disseminating the three initiatives per category that the jury has considered most relevant and of interest to be observed further and studied. The process of voting thus becomes a way of disseminating and making known the real utopias that we believe are worth learning from.
Regardless of which initiative is the winner, what is important in terms of disseminating and learning is that the three finalist initiatives in each category will be included in the Atlas of Utopias: the repository of each year’s finalists, which we consider the starting point for anyone interested in learning from transformative initiatives in the categories of water, energy, food, and housing.
Atlas of Utopias: The challenge of translation
“Translating” the information poses a challenge: how can we present the information in such a way that, despite the differences in contexts, valuable lessons can be drawn and incorporated in other processes of transformation and struggle for the same demands. The Atlas of Utopias is our attempt to address that interpretation challenge, showing the real utopias that can be interpreted as useful information for those who, in different geographies, seek to articulate a social majority around specific demands, organizing to fight for them, and even succeeding in institutionalizating the provision of services in a transformative way.
We work on the assumption that, despite the differences in scales, cultures, or correlation of forces, there is a common context to every local struggle, and that context is neoliberalism and the neoliberal economic policy that most affects people’s lives: the privatization of public services, which has left populations without access to the basic resources that the award recognizes. And, at the same time, local struggles involve multiple stakeholders, with different values, rationalities, interests, worldviews, and perspectives. A central element of the winning initiatives is precisely their ability to forge alliances among different stakeholders and groups.
Because of that, we believe that it is important to develop different types of narratives for the various readers. They do not all occupy the same position, nor do they have the same background, or pose the same questions. Therefore, in order for the information to be of interest and speak to the plurality of stakeholders involved in local politics, an effort has been made to generate different narratives, both in content and in format, making the information available in several languages, and presenting different aspects of the initiatives, in terms both of scope and depth, through brief descriptions and more extensive ones on the web, journalistic accounts that offer a local and external point of view, videos, interviews, and even the application forms, which are available for anyone who wishes to read the details of the initiatives. Everything is done with the same objective: offering diverse narratives for the diverse readers and their own interests.
Even so, we must recognize that despite the international reach of the Internet and social media, which has made it possible to gather and disseminate information from different places around the world, our conclusions are limited to the initiatives that apply for the award. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. It is an advantage because of the methodological validity of the research, as the fact that it is the initiatives themselves that apply positively affects the quality of the tool, resulting in the study’s sample not being determined beforehand by the researchers, and being instead a sample that is in a way random and far from the typical “bias” risk affecting research studies, which consists in selecting the cases that best demonstrate the theory one sets out to prove.
The disadvantage is that we have “only” the initiatives that apply, which means that a vast range of initiatives from around the world are left out of the sample and therefore out of the Atlas of Utopias, simply because they have not applied for the award, and this limits the scope of our conclusions, but above all it limits the diversity of initiatives that can be shown. For that reason, the award’s efforts would not be enough without the support of other institutions that contribute to disseminate the call, and which are a key part of the evaluation process.
At TNI we understood that the best way to secure that support was by creating an award that would be useful to international networks and organizations working to transform the world, and, at the same time, would be an open process enriched by the experience and vision of those who would commit to disseminate and evaluate the award. Thus, from the first edition, the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award became a collective initiative furthered together with the following organizations: European Network for Community-led Initiatives on Climate Change and Sustainability (Ecolise); Friends of the Earth International (FoEI); RIPESS (an intercontinental network for the promotion of social solidarity economy); Habitat International Coalition (HIC); The Global Platform for the Right to the City (GPR2C), and United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG).
Conclusion: What remains to be done to facilitate learning
In knowledge transfer, it is useful to distinguish two moments: the generation of knowledge by those who have experimented in practice; and the learning of that knowledge by those wishing to experiment with that newly acquired knowledge. In the editions of the award that have been held thus far, the first part of knowledge transfer has been achieved, as real utopias have been recognized all over the planet and a diversity of narratives have been generated based on those initiatives. What needs to be done now is facilitate learning and support those who wish to put the knowledge available into practice.
But that cannot be a task limited solely to TNI. TNI is a facilitator of knowledge, corresponding to the first moment mentioned above. Now is the time to forge a great alliance and collaborate with all those individuals, collectives, and organizations wishing to draw lessons from the Atlas of Utopias, and to find together the mechanisms, dynamics, and pedagogies that best respond to the learning processes of each of the different stakeholders and groups, each with their own approaches, interests, available resources, and incentives for the future.
The main objective of the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award is the generation of knowledge that will be useful for those who find themselves in the same situation of unfulfillment of demands that we consider essential for survival, who are looking to draw inspiration and lessons from initiatives that share their problems and have done something relevant to achieve the satisfaction of that same demand.
This is the reason why the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award is accompanied by the Atlas of Utopias, which is the core product of the effort of this project, as it tries to show precisely those real utopias in which it has been possible to articulate a social majority14 around concrete demands for water, food, energy, and housing, and which have succeeded in institutionalizing the provision of the service in a transformative way, that is, in a way that points in the direction of that alternative future that neoliberal ideology has been bent on denying.
In other words, the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award and the Atlas of Utopias seek to demonstrate that it is false that a different world is not possible, that there is, in fact, a post-capitalist world that is in the process of being defined, a process that is already underway and whose pending task is to encourage local communities around the world to be inspired by and learn from those who have believed that a better world is possible and are making it happen day by day with their work.
Notes
1 Erik Olin Wright (2010) Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, p. 4.
2 “The General Assembly, based on the UN-Habitat Agenda, further recommends that best practices be used as one of the two key instruments for assessing progress.” In “Declaration on Cities and Other Human Settlements in the New Millennium.” Resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. A/RES/S-25/2. August 16, 2001.
3 https://hwpi.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/liaison_group_brochure_0.pdf
4 The institutions members of the group include: Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard University, United States; Premio Gobierno y Gestión Local, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE), Mexico; Galling Pook Foundation, Philippines; MILGAP-East Africa, UN-Habitat; Red para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Perú; Innovations and Excellence in Local Chinese Governance, China; Impumelelo Innovations Award Trust, South Africa; Centro de Estudos em Administração Pública e Cidadania, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil; Programa Innovación y Ciudadanía, Universidad de los Lagos, Chile.
5 Some notable examples are the works by Michael Barzelay (1992) on “post-bureaucracy”, Mark H. Moore (1995) on “creating public value”, and Sandford Borins (2014) on “local innovation”.
6 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) (2007) Guide for the Transfer and Adaptation of Innovations in Governance. Practical Tools and Steps. UN-Habitat. A United Nations publication. New York. ST/ESA/PAD/SER.E/122. http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un-dpadm/unpan046742.pdf
7 Guido Bertucci and Adriana Alberti (2006) Innovations in Governance and Public Administration: Replicating What Works. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations. New York.
8 Rosenblatt, M. (2011) “The use of innovation awards in the public sector: Individual and organizational perspective.” Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice. Volume 13, Issue 2, August 2011, pp. 207–219.
9 L. F. Aguilar Villanueva, 1992, 1996, 2004; M. Merino, D. Arellano, and G. Cejudo, 2010; B. Dente and J. Subirats, 2014
10 D. Della Porta et al, 2017; T. Villasante, 2017; J. Dean, 2017; P. Ibarra Güel et al, 2018; E. .López Barceló, 2017.
11 O. D. Meza Canales, 2013, p. 23.
12 For more details on the forms, you can access the Atlas of Utopias, where all the forms completed by the finalist initiatives in the Transformative Cities People’s Choice Awards can be found: https://transformativecities.org/atlas-of-utopias/
13 To see the profiles of the evaluators team or jury, visit the web page of each edition of the award:
First edition: https://transformativecities.org/2018award/evaluators-team/
Second edition: https://transformativecities.org/2019award/evaluators-team/
Third edition: https://transformativecities.org/2020award/evaluators-team/
14 It should be noted that by social majority we do not mean a numerical majority in the sense of “half plus one” or “two thirds”. Rather a social majority is a certain group of people, in a specific political community, that has secured “enough” social support to trigger the social change that is being demanded. And while we understand that in a democracy this may entail securing a support that is reflected in the number of votes, of a certain majority over those who oppose social change, the specific number of that majority will always be relative, and it will depend on the context and the correlation of forces at the local level, varying according to the phases of the process of change, and even transcending electoral periods, so that even in a democracy it is necessary not to reduce the idea of social majority to electoral majority.