ABOUT THE COOPERATIVE CITY

Our cities are complex systems: they are not produced exclusively by development agencies, municipal departments or planning institutions. Instead, they are created by a multiplicity of actors, formal and informal, from neighbourhood initiatives and citizen movements to private and public development projects, policy frameworks and international funding schemes. City making is a set of negotiated processes that unfold in networks of actors through confrontations, conflicts, alliances and cooperations. In this magazine, we explore these processes through the testimonies of their protagonists, telling stories of urban transformation from different viewpoints and looking into the manners in which these actors contribute to shaping the culture, governance, environment, communities and economies of cities: the way they design, implement and readjust their actions and the ways they complement or counter the impact of one another.