open cities

What are 'open cities' (and we don't mean the game...):
Open Cities Africa
Open City | London's architecture education organisation » Open City
OPENCities - Wikipedia
refugee open cities
Smart cities are decades away: but open cities are within reach – The ODI
OpenCity

To what extent is your city 'open'?

Here's an example:
Jay Doubleyou: open cities: gdansk

And another:

Major Mayors of Europe – Bart Somers

He has been mayor of Mechelen since 2001, minister-president of Flanders and MP in the national and regional parliaments – he is Bart Somers

Island of tolerance in ocean of distrust

Mechelen is by far one of the most diverse places in Europe. The city is home to over 120 nationalities, representing numerous religions and thanks to the efforts of its mayor, it has become a beacon of hope that different societies can work together for the common good. The first large number of non-european migrants arrived in Mechelen in 1968, mainly from Morocco. Their descendants represent around 16% of the city’s total population. Nearly 20% of the citizens of the Flemish city identify as Muslim. Yet, despite far-right politicians claiming that migrants are here to destroy our way of life, nothing of the sort has happened in Mechelen.

If you ask Bart Somers on how he approaches the topic of migrants, he will answer that there are no migrants in Mechelen – instead everyone is first and foremost a citizen of the city, who is unique and completely different from everybody else. This individualistic approach has allowed the mayor to cement Mechelen’s place in world rankings as one of the most tolerant and open cities in the world. His success in the matter is further exemplified by the sheer numbers of Muslims that left to fight for ISIS in 2015. That number was zero. Despite the fact that Belgian muslims were on average more prone to leave the country to fight in Syria.

Mechelen was also the only city in Belgium which specifically asked for permission to house Syrian refugees and the mayor’s team developed an in-depth programme of integrating them in Belgian society – including language lessons, cultural and societal courses etc. He believes that while some citizens were opposed to the idea at first, by working and helping the refugees, residents of Mechelen learned to overcome their fears and prejudices and in the end welcomed everyone fleeing the horrors of war.

Major Mayors of Europe – Bart Somers | TheMayor EU

Here's an interesting bit of text:

The Open City 

Richard Sennett 

The cities everyone wants to live in should be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, be supported by a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and also do their best to heal society's divisions of race, class, and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in. 

Cities fail on all these counts due to government policies, irreparable social ills, and economic forces beyond local control. The city is not its own master. Still, something has gone wrong, radically wrong, in our conception of what a city itself should be. Perhaps those nice words -- clean, safe, efficient, dynamic – are not enough in themselves to confront critically our masters...

Microsoft Word - The Open City.docx

Here's the talk:



(1) Open City | Lecture by sociologist Richard Sennett - YouTube
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