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The City of Lahti, Finland began its first participatory budgeting (PB) project that would span the entire city. The city used Maptionnaire Community Engagement Platform to digitize and streamline the process. As this project was successful among residents, the city now runs a PB process annually.
The main goals were to strengthen the local community, increase transparency in decision-making and make public spending more efficient.
With Maptionnaire’s community engagement tool, Lahti managed to organise the whole process digitally. Before the process started, the city agreed on the budget used for the process and established a digital hub for the PB project where citizens will submit their ideas, vote, and hear updates about the process.
Phase one.
Citizens were asked to tell the City about their ideas related to the themes of wellbeing, environment, community, or children/teens. The ideas had to be non-commercial and realistic for the City to implement and maintain (so no unicorn parks or time-traveling machines allowed, sadly).
The City also chose 12 volunteers to serve as PB partners. The partners are ordinary citizens from different areas in Lahti whose task was to support the project in their area.
Phase two.
Coordinators evaluated the submitted ideas and choose the ones with the most potential to be developed further in workshops with citizens.
Phase three.
Citizens started voting for the best proposals. The ideas had been divided between the four major areas of the city, with each area having a budget of 40,000€ to spend. The remaining 40,000€ was to be spent on proposals for the entire city.…
Citizen participation is at the heart of a Participatory Budgeting process. Anyone is welcome to submit an idea for city development and vote on the best proposal. The threshold for participation is low, which made it easier for citizens to share their wishes and ideas about the future of the city. At the same time, if a citizen is not digitally apt, there are options to submit ideas in an analog way.
