Neighborly
= "crowd-funding platform Neighbor.ly focuses on the financing issues of urban projects and services. On this newly launched platform everyone, including local authorities, companies and non-profit-organizations, can start a campaign to get money together for specific urban projects". [1]
URL = http://neighbor.ly/
Discussion
Joop De Boer:
"Besides all the opportunities that this new way of generating money for urbanism provides, there’s also a less convenient angle. The decision making process about governmental investments in the city could easily be influenced by the willingness of inhabitants to reach out a hand financially. Some projects, however, are less appealing to crowd-funders or supposed to be carried out in less fortunate communities. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the project is less important. Crowd-funding, in that sense, should probably not affect the neutrality of the local public sector. What shows to be a community-driven bottom-up-kind of city-making could easily become a new form of privatization of urbanism. Apart from that, crowd-funding by governments could easily lead to new ways of letting citizens pay extra for services that they already had paid for by means of taxes." (http://popupcity.net/neighborly-a-new-way-to-let-you-pay/)