About Transformative Cities

Transformative Cities People’s Choice Award 2018 Finale

Transformative Cities is an opportunity for progressive local governments, municipalist coalitions, social movements and civil society organizations to popularize and share their experiences of building solutions to our planet’s intertwined political and ecological crises.

The initiative draws on the emerging wave of transformative practices and responses taking place at the municipal level worldwide, by launching a unique platform and award process that will facilitate the wider dissemination of the lessons and inspiration from such practices.

Transformative Cities is a platform facilitated by several international partners of international civil society organisations and social movements.

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The Atlas of Utopias is an initiative by Transformative Cities. It is a unique collection of community-led transformations of water, energy, food and housing systems from all over the world. The cases collected in the Atlas of Utopias show how public solutions based on principles of cooperation and solidarity, rather than competition and private profit, have been successful in meeting people’s basic needs. And, perhaps just as importantly, it maps how these initiatives have created a spirit of confidence and empowerment that strengthen communities for many other challenges. All initiatives presented in the Atlas have responded to the yearly Open Call part of the People’s Choice Award.

Discover the Atlas of Utopias.

Every year, Transformative Cities organises the awarding of the People’s Choice Award. The awardees are chosen from a larger list of initiatives that respond to our open call. Three initiatives from each category (energy, food, water, and housing) are chosen as finalists through a process carried out by an international and multidisciplinary group of evaluators. Every year, the team of evaluators is enriched with one representative from the previous year’s winners.

See the evaluators team of 2020, 2019 and 2018 editions.

As part of the award, commissioned journalists visit the finalist initiatives to expose their story to an international audience. The winners are chosen via an open online vote and announced in the Finale Event we organise each year in Amsterdam.

The goal of the award is not to put one experience above others. This is an exercise of Coopetition, meaning that we seek cooperation but have introduced an element of competition to encourage public interaction and engagement. Transformative Cities aims to support the awardees by giving them visibility on our website as well as those of allied organizations and partners.

Get inspired by the stories of the winners of the 2020, 2019 and 2018 editions.

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