uitermark, justus (2015) longing for wikitopia. the study and politics of self-organization, urban...

Critical commentary

Urban Studies2015, Vol. 52(13) 2301–2312� Urban Studies Journal Limited 2015Reprints and permissions:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0042098015577334usj.sagepub.com

Longing for Wikitopia: The studyand politics of self-organisation

Justus UitermarkUniversity of Amsterdam and Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands

AbstractSelf-organisation is an idea whose time has come. As an explanatory concept, self-organisation iscentral to complexity theory, which is quickly becoming a powerful and perhaps even dominantparadigm in both the natural and social sciences. As a political ideal, self-organisation is filling thevoid that is opening up as both the state and market are increasingly perceived as undemocratic,unjust and inefficient. Drawing on observations from the Dutch city of Rotterdam, this paperargues that self-organisation indeed is an inspiring ideal but that it is often misunderstood andmay produce adverse consequences when used as a policy guide. While self-organisation is tooinspiring to abandon, its harsh realities need to be accounted for if we want to think and workwith it.

Keywordscommunity, complexity theory, government, Internet, self-organisation

Received March 2014; accepted February 2015

The complex patterns insects produce are anendless source of fascination for scientists.Fireflies dance in amazing patterns andswitch on and off in perfect synchrony.Ants, termites, and bees create structureswith a baffling architecture and use highlyadvanced methods to locate and transportfood. The creations are so complex that it ishard not to believe they are produced byarchitects or designers, but reality is moreinspiring. There are no leaders or directors.The impressive nests, the refined survivalstrategies, the enchanting dances or thesophisticated divisions of labour are not pro-duced by design. The complex patterns areemergent, they rise up out of distributedlocal interactions; they result from self-organisation. Self-organisation has emerged

as a central concept within science in recentyears. All sorts of complex structures – rang-ing from brains to the economy – have beenanalysed as the outcome of self-organisation(e.g. Ball, 2013; Johnson, 2002; Kauffman,1993).

Self-organisation has not only gainedground as an explanatory concept but alsoas a political ideal. The development of tech-nologies for distributed communication hasreinvigorated hopes that people can coordi-nate and cooperate without delegating power

Corresponding author:

Justus Uitermark, Amsterdam School for Social Science

Research, University of Amsterdam, PO Box 15508,

Amsterdam, 1001 NA, Netherlands.

Email: [email protected]

at Universiteit van Amsterdam on December 1, 2015usj.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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to a central authority. Wikipedia is perhapsthe ultimate example. The online encyclopae-dia is not created by experts but by hundredsof thousands of volunteers who add or revisetopics on their own initiative, in effect creat-ing the world’s biggest evolving repository ofhuman knowledge. Recent social movementsalso embrace the ideal of self-organisation.The web-based movement Anonymous, theOccupy movement and the Spanish indigna-dos all reject the delegation of power to lead-ership and even question the very idea ofrepresentation itself. As Manuel Castellsnotes for the case of the indignados, this net-worked movement ‘positioned itself againstintermediaries, be it political, media, or cul-tural’ and he notes ‘a paradigm shift’ as themovement seeks to be ‘created equally bythousands of people’ each of whom speakfor themselves and for themselves only(Toret quoted in Castells, 2012: 121).

Perhaps most strikingly, self-organisationhas also been embraced by governments.The idea that state interventions should pri-marily be aimed at strengthening civil societyrather than the state has become a mainstayof international development (Watkins etal., 2012) and more recently governments ofWestern Europe have also accorded increas-ingly important roles for local communities,recasting them from parties for consultationto prime drivers of social change. In theUnited Kingdom, Cameron’s governmentdeclared its opposition to ‘Big Government’and support for a ‘Big Society’ composed ofempowered local communities (CabinetOffice, 2010: 1). The Dutch cabinet states ina recent position paper that society’s self-organising capacities are growing (Ministryof Interior Affairs, 2013) and believes, as perKing Willem’s by now infamous speech, thatthe classic welfare state must transform intoa ‘participation society’. Just as citizens havegrown increasingly distrustful and critical ofgovernments, governments are increasingly

declaring their faith in citizens’ zeal andcreativity. Networked communities ratherthan hierarchical states have come to be seenas the source of welfare, prosperity, andhappiness.

By reporting from the trenches of the‘participation society’ in the city ofRotterdam, this paper follows in the tracksof the social state to see what happens as itretreats and mutates. Rather than openingup a void free of state interference, weobserve the contradictory – clumsy, creative,ferocious – reconfiguration of relationshipswithin communities and between commu-nities and the government. This paper exam-ines the uneven and contradictorydevelopment of self-organisation but firsttakes a closer look at the rise of self-organisation as a political ideal.

The irresistible rise of self-organisation

As signalled by its simultaneous rise in dif-ferent sectors, self-organisation has devel-oped into a paradigmatic concept that bothexplains and prescribes how societies, andalso cities, function. It has become commonto represent the city as akin to a biologicalsystem with a natural order in which everyattempt at design or control is problematicor destructive. This quote by the plannerMichael Batty, as cited by the physicistPhilip Ball (2013: 46), illustrates this well:

Planning, design, control, management – what-ever constellation of interventionist perspec-tives are adopted – are difficult and potentiallydangerous. If we assume that social systemsand cities [are] like biological systems . theninterventions are potentially destructive unlesswe have a deep understanding of their causaleffects. As we have learned more, we becomewary of the effects of such concerted action.

Ball goes on to argue that:

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the only effective way to manage cities will beto discover their intrinsic bottom-up principlesof self-organization, and then to work withthose so as to guide the process along desir-able routes, rather than trying to impose someunreachable and unsustainable order andstructure. (Ball, 2013: 43)

It is important at this point to distinguishthe general concept of self-organisation andthe political ideal. As an explanatory con-cept self-organisation accounts for the waysin which social and natural life evolves. Self-organisation thus understood can refer tonatural selection or bureaucracy running outof control and it can refer to processes thatare benign or malign. However, self-organisation has taken on a specific ideolo-gical guise in recent scholarly literature andpolicy statements. In this conception, anarbitrary distinction is made between, on theone hand, ‘the system’ with its endogenousand ingenious principles of self-organisation(i.e. the market and civil society) and, on theother hand, ‘interventions’ as carried out bysome agent alien and exogenous to the sys-tem (i.e. the state). Rather than conceivingof the state as foundational or integral tourban and social systems (Schinkel, 2012),its role then becomes to foster and respectthe self-organising of communities and espe-cially the market. Adopting a view of citiesas akin to biological systems distracts fromthe wider political and economic forces thatdetermine the ground rules for urban devel-opment and makes it possible to portrayeven contested processes like gentrificationas ‘natural’ (Ball, 2014; for a critique seeSlater, 2014).

Although this governmentality is cloakedin an antipolitical vocabulary (Rose, 2000:1400), it mobilises enthusiasm and scepticismin particular ways: while the logic throughwhich uncoordinated and individual deci-sions produce social outcomes is readilyaccepted as a consequence of intrinsic princi-ples of self-organisation that have to be

respected, the logic through which collectiveand coordinated decisions produce socialoutcomes is suspect.

Thus emerges the ideal of the self-organised city, a city where people are notdirected by central authorities but cooperatevoluntarily in communities and for the pub-lic good. We might call that city Wikitopia,an ideal city where bottom-up cooperationcoalesces into an ingenious and complexsocial organisation. Reading recent policydocuments and media reports, one might getthe impression that the realisation ofWikitopia is in process. Journalists, scholarsand government officials produce maga-zines, blogs, and books with inspiring exam-ples of people who organise their own careprovisions, generate their own energy, createtheir own child care facilities, or farm theirown food. Neighbourhood centres run byresidents rather than welfare organisationshave become places of pilgrimage for gov-ernment officials who have converted to thefaith in community power.

The idea that people creatively and har-moniously create their city from the bottom-up is indeed irresistible. The civic successstories are a breath of fresh air for a societydesperate for new ways of organising soli-darity and social relations. It would be amistake to view the longing for Wikitopia asonly the fig leaf for brutal budget cuts.Wikitopia has political and ideologicalappeal to both left and right as it promisesthat the power invested in rigid institutionswill be distributed across communities capa-ble of taking control over their own affairs.The longing for Wikitopia is a contempo-rary variant of utopian ideas on volitionalsolidarity found in anarchism, libertarianismor socialism and in Christian and other reli-gions. From the hypermodern cyberneticsmovement to groups aspiring to go back tonature, self-organisation features strongly inprojections of an alternative social order.Initiatives that operate without market

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incentives or state imposition can beregarded as ‘real utopias’ that prefigurewhat alternative ways of organising socialrelations and solidarity might look like(Wright, 2013).

At the same time, the government’s ideali-sation of citizens and the boasting aboutcivic power raises suspicions. It is narcissisticto only see the power and beauty of civilsociety. The idealisation of citizens – by gov-ernments and occasionally by citizens them-selves – betrays a lack of real curiosity andtrue commitment as it is blind to self-organi-sation’s weaknesses and darker side. MichaelBatty is certainly right when he says, asquoted above, that government interventionis ‘difficult and potentially dangerous’ butthis is just as well true of self-organisationand policies aiming to harness self-organisa-tion. Just as the state can fail, so can themarket, and so can civil society.

The challenge is to walk on the fine linebetween, on the one hand, denouncing theideal of self-organisation as a fig leaf forcold-hearted austerity and, on the otherhand, celebrating self-organisation as aninfallible or inescapable principle of govern-ment (North, 2011). What we need to doinstead is to cultivate curiosity and commit-ment. This requires, on the one hand, a dis-tanced, macroscopic view that allows us tomap and explain broad patterns. On theother hand, it requires a microscopic view toexamine what goes on within self-organisingnetworks.

A macroscopic view

With a macroscopic view we can examinewhere self-organisation takes off and whereit does not. In recent years, researchers haveshown that self-organisation develops stron-ger in some than in other areas. RobertPutnam has shown in his studies on Italy(Putnam, 1993) and the United States(Putnam, 2007) that some areas have greater

capacity for self-organisation than others.Robert Sampson’s research on Chicago alsoshows the uneven distribution of self-organi-sation. Initiatives like charity benefits or pro-test actions are much more present in somethan in other neighbourhoods (Sampson,2012). What explains this uneven develop-ment? Although research shows that eco-nomically deprived and ethnically diverseareas score relatively low, residential compo-sition does not fully account for the geogra-phical differences. More important than thebackground characteristics of the populationis the institutional tissue of associations andfoundations that enable people to connect(Putnam, 1993; Sampson, 2012). WalterNicholls (2009) calls places where this tissueis strongly developed relational incubators.

The city of Rotterdam in the Netherlandsis one interesting case for examining self-organisation – here colloquially understoodas collective action by citizens that is notdirected by the government – because coop-eration towards a common cause is far fromtrivial here. Rotterdam has become knownin the Netherlands and in the academic liter-ature as a city where revanchist sentimentshave been forcefully expressed (Van denBerg, 2012; Van Eijk, 2010). Anxieties aboutthe discontents of multicultural society arenow compounded by concerns over austeritymeasures. As in other countries, the Dutchgovernment simultaneously cuts budgetsand delegates responsibilities to municipalgovernments. Considering the magnitude ofthe budget cuts, municipal governments arereconsidering their own role. On the onehand, they are tightening their grip ongroups subjected to workfare policies. Onthe other hand, municipalities are now moreeagerly than before looking for ways to givecommunities the space they need to provideservices through mutual support and gener-alised reciprocity. This longing for a moreWikitopian city is not mere veneer for dra-conic budget-cuts but also expresses widely




felt discontents with state-delivered serviceswhich are believed – not just by governmentsor parties on the right – to have alienatedpeople by considering them as customers ortarget groups rather than constituents. Oneimportant question, however, is where andhow communities can and do self-organise.

A first insight into Rotterdam’s varie-gated geography of self-organising capacitycan be gleaned from Rotterdam’s SocialIndex survey. Respondents were asked ifthey take care of less able people, improvetheir neighbourhood in some way, and workas volunteers. When the answers are scaledand expressed as grades, the poor and ethni-cally diverse neighbourhoods of Bloemhof,Tussendijken and Bospolder would not passthe test while the more affluent and homoge-neous neighbourhoods of Hillegersberg-Schiebroek and Hoek van Holland scorehigh grades. The first impression these fig-ures give is in line with Robert Putnam’sfinding that deprived and diverse neighbour-hoods do not do well.

However, when we look at neighbour-hood data rather than aggregated individualdata, a very different pattern comes up. Asurvey of Rotterdam’s civil initiatives showsa surprisingly even distribution: all city dis-tricts have between 200 and 300 citizeninitiatives (Schinkel et al., 2010). A plausibleexplanation for this pattern is thatRotterdam has a highly developed city-wideinfrastructure for community development.From the 1980s onwards, the municipalityhas invested in umbrella organisations andprofessional support for residents, immi-grants, women and other groups(Uitermark, 2012). Through that infrastruc-ture the Rotterdam government has rolledout city-wide community development pro-grammes, with the so-called Opzoomeren asiconic example. Opzoomeren was inventedwhen residents in the run-downOpzoomerstraat decided to work collectivelyto make the street clean and friendly by

sweeping the street and planting flowers.The municipality scaled this initiative up tothe entire city and since the 1990s hundredsof street groups throughout Rotterdam par-ticipate in Opzoomeren. More recently theactivities of Opzoomeren have beenexpanded to Dutch language lessons andreading sessions which are now organisedthroughout Rotterdam with financial andprofessional support from the municipality.These kinds of community development pro-grammes are strongly associated with thesocial state; they are centrally coordinated,standardised, and rely on public funds andprofessional support.

The government in the ‘participationsociety’ demands more and gives less.Citizens are expected to play key roles inproviding their own provisions. One impor-tant example is public libraries. In theUnited Kingdom, hundreds of publiclibraries have closed but also many newcommunity-run libraries have been estab-lished. In Rotterdam, the governmentdecided to close down 14 out of the 21libraries in 2011. In response to the closureof the public library in their neighbourhood,two sociologists and active residents, Jokevan der Zwaard and Maurice Spechtfounded the Reading Salon West, a vibrantplace where people read, work, take Dutchlessons, organise meetings, and performpoetry or music. The Reading Salon becameone of those places of pilgrimage for govern-ment officials as it supposedly demonstratesthat unsubsidised volunteers are better capa-ble of creating vibrant neighbourhoodspaces than publicly funded officials.

However, there is more to the successstory than the ingenuity and commitment ofthe Reading Salon’s founders. The ReadingSalon could emerge in this neighbourhoodbecause of the strong institutional tissue thathad historically developed around theAktiegroep Oude Westen (Van der Zwaardand Specht, 2013). The networks that had

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been cultivated through the Aktiegroepenabled the Reading Salon’s founders toreach out to potential volunteers and mobi-lise people to design, maintain, and operatethe space. This helps us understand why inall the other 14 neighbourhoods where pub-lic libraries had to close, residents have notsuccessfully taken initiatives to createcommunity-run libraries. Organising an ini-tiative like the Reading Salon requiresimmense effort from dozens or even hun-dreds of people volunteering their time andcoordinating their activities. In the absenceof strong and dense pre-existing networks,undertaking an enterprise of this magnitudeis too much even for very committed andskilful initiators.

Not only social but also economic capitalis unevenly distributed and such inequality islikely to increasingly translate into unevenservice provision as the state delegates itsresponsibilities. Celebrated forms of self-organisation like cooperatives in the field ofcare, housing construction, or renewableenergy emerge where people are well-organised and can afford the necessaryinvestments. Elanor Ostrom’s research thatis often used to underscore the value and fea-sibility of self-organisation suggests thatrobust forms of common resource manage-ment benefit from homogeneity among par-ticipants and the possibility of excluding ofoutsiders (Dietz et al., 2003: 1908). The so-called Klushuizen, or Do It Yourself houses,are an example of common resource man-agement in the field of housing. As part ofan operation to upgrade the neighbourhoodof Spangen, the Rotterdam municipalitybought an entire housing complex and gaveit for free to a cooperation of aspiring home-owners on the condition that they wouldrenovate the buildings. The project has beenwidely cited as an inspiring example of colla-borative and bottom-up initiative. It didindeed provide tangible benefits for thegroup of home-owners – a spacious and

affordable home overlooking a gated inner-garden that is a focal point for vibrant com-munity life – but these are not available forpeople unable to finance a major renovation.

These examples illustrate that communitylife may surge where the governmentdevolves responsibilities and assets to com-munities but they also illustrate that this is ahighly uneven process. A research agendainto global patterns of self-organisationshould not only examine success stories butall cases to search for underlying factors thataccount for self-organising or the lackthereof. It is important to acknowledge thatresidents in one neighbourhood created avery successful initiative in response to theclosure of their neighbourhood library but itis equally important to recognise that this isexceptional as no community initiativesemerged in 13 other neighbourhoods wherepublic libraries closed. If we take a broadlook, we find that self-organisation isunevenly distributed across countries, cities,and neighbourhoods. This makes it all themore interesting and urgent to investigatethe geographical distribution of self-organisation and explain why some areasfare better than others.

A microscopic view

Research into the determinants of self-organisation can give insight into the struc-tural conditions that conduce or restrain citi-zens’ initiatives. But self-organisation is nota pure expression of these conditions. Peoplewho organise and take initiatives try to beatthe odds and outmanoeuvre conditions hin-dering them. This is a fascinating processexactly because it is difficult. People are notfire flies, bees or ants. While those insectsknow their place instinctively, self-organisation among people is even in thebest cases the result of struggle and trial anderror (see Harvey, 2000). When we take amicroscopic view of self-organisation, we do




not observe the seamless confluence of pre-programmed elements but different charac-ters and interests which sometimes creativelymerge but at other times tragically crash.

Let’s look at one spectacular example byway of illustration – the Burning Man festi-val that takes place each year in the BlackRock Desert in Nevada. The festival isinspired by the philosophy that visitors arenot passive consumers but active partici-pants who co-produce performances, makesculptures, offer massages, and play music.Goods and services are not traded butexchanged through a gift economy. BurningMan is a sort of Wikitopia. The festival siteis a makeshift city where tens of thousandsof visitors each decide on their own initiativewhat they do or contribute. But lookingfrom above, it becomes apparent that thesechaotic and creative interactions take place

within a clear structure reflecting classichierarchical steering (Figure 1). InitiallyBurning Man was radically unstructured butas the festival grew and incidents took place,the organisation of Burning Man consoli-dated and became more stringent. A for-profit organisation was established and adirector was put in charge to streamlinecoordination and a range of restrictionswere imposed on participants to preventincidents (Chen, 2009). The organisationattempts to be radically inclusive but to doso it paradoxically has to make stipulationsand impose restrictions.

That even Burning Man adopts hierarchi-cal steering and takes on the form of a cor-porate entity is suggestive of the limitationsand contradictions of self-organisation.While exclusion, power concentration, andbureaucratisation are often considered as

Figure 1. Burning Man aerial.Source: Kyle Harmon, Creative Commons licence.

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counter or alien to self-organisation, thesetendencies can emerge from self-organisa-tion. This is also the case for perhaps themost iconic example of the power of self-organisation, Wikipedia. As pointed out inthe introduction, Wikipedia is an impressiveand inspiring example of self-organisationbut a closer look at the online encyclopaediareveals that cooperation and coordinationamong the hundreds of thousands ofvolunteers requires considerable work. Self-organisation is facilitated by a formal orga-nisation, the Wikimedia Foundation, thatmaintains servers, fights legal battles, raisesfunds, and develops software. Wikimediaalso struggles with tendencies towardsbureaucratisation and exclusion. In theirefforts to work efficiently and conscien-tiously, Wikipedia editors have developedjargon, acronyms, and rules that comeacross to outsiders as obscure and secretivelanguage. That secretive language has notbeen developed with the purpose of exclud-ing others but yet this is what happens.Newcomers find that their edits and addi-tions are often immediately undone by moresenior editors or automated content manage-ment systems (so-called ‘bots’) (Rijshouwerand Uitermark, 2014). Wikipedia andBurning Man are spectacular and inspiringexamples of self-organisation but those suc-cess stories are exceptional and moreoverambivalent. While many commentators givethe impression that contemporary self-organising networks elide tendencies to cen-tralisation or exclusion, it turns out that self-organising networks are often less open, flex-ible, and egalitarian than we perhaps wouldlike (Freeman, 1973). Exactly because self-organising networks lack central oversightand people do not know their place instinc-tively, it is a matter of struggle and improvi-sation to bring divergent ideals and interestsin line (Boutellier, 2011).

This process of struggle and negotiationis especially challenging in urban areas

characterised by deprivation and competingdemands from diverse groups on limitedspace. Schipper’s (2014) ethnography of aresident-run community centre inRotterdam provides one interesting exam-ple. The centre used to be managed by a wel-fare foundation until budget cuts forced it toclose in 2012. The building remained vacantfor almost two years until a group of neigh-bourhood residents occupied it. Whilebefore the centre had been run by profes-sionals, after its relaunch it developed a cul-ture of cooperation underpinned by activeparticipation and now provides space toTurkish and Moroccan women learning tomend clothing, Polish and Dutch residentsexchanging language lessons, former prison-ers reintegrating into mainstream society byassisting activities, pensioned artisans doingrepairs, and clients of labour market reinte-gration programmes. The residents rituallyreiterate how their occupation of the build-ing ushered in a period of civic resurgence.Their new community centre receives subsi-dies and assistance from subsidised profes-sional organisations but a crucial differenceis that residents are now in charge and thatthey have a diverse yet connected constitu-ency of user groups. However, a challengethe residents face is that the government willincrease the rent to ‘commercial’ levels aftertwo years because it feels its task is only tohelp kickstart projects, not to sustain them.This is likely to result in the end of the proj-ect or a reorientation to other, more profit-able groups and uses, which are – by theway – difficult to find in this deprivedneighbourhood.

Van Summeren’s (2012) case study of acommunity garden provides another inter-esting glance into the micro-dynamics ofself-managed spaces. The community gardenshe researched has been created on a vacantlot of land that had not been developedbecause of the financial crisis, providing oneexample of how aborted projects created




new spaces for civic engagement. CreatiefBeheer, the organisation managing the spacefor the government, receives funds from themunicipal budget for physical managementbut it opts for a more community-basedapproach as it employs gardeners who areexpected to cultivate the land and to culti-vate community in the process – a practiceGilchrist (2000: 269) refers to as ‘human hor-ticulture’. Creatief Beheer radically embracesthe principle of openness and refuses to erectfences, use surveillance cameras or regulateaccess through identification cards. This phi-losophy goes against the intuition of manyneighbourhood residents using the garden.They pressure the professionals to regulateaccess and enforce rules but Creatief Beheercategorically rejects these demands.Although this strategy is not without itscosts, Van Summeren’s (2012) research

suggests that it may be successful. Her net-work analysis shows that the users of thegarden segregate into different clusters butthese clusters are connected through brokerswho mediate potentially conflictive relations(Figure 2). The biggest node in Figure 2 is aprofessional working for Creatief Beheer,which indicates that she is an important bro-ker between individuals. However, she isstrongly connected to adults with mostlyDutch backgrounds while having no directconnections to a group of neighbourhoodyoungsters with mostly foreign back-grounds, represented by the tightly con-nected yet somewhat isolated cluster at thetop of Figure 2. A youngster of Turkish des-cent, represented by the second biggest nodein the middle of the figure, forms a bridgebetween the adults and youngsters. Since thisyoungster was trusted by both groups, he

Figure 2. Network structure of social relations in a community garden managed by Creatief Beheer.Nodes represent persons; edges indicate persons engaging in activities together; colours indicate clusters; node size

indicates betweenness centrality, a measure for brokerage.

Source: Van Summeren (2012).

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could help to bring about results the profes-sionals could not achieve alone; he enlistedvolunteers and carved out a space for theyoungsters to participate. The network isnevertheless fragile; relations are dispropor-tionally formed around a professional andthere are only few linkages among segre-gated groups. Given the likely prospect offurther budget cuts, the hope is that resi-dents will self-organise as a community tomanage the garden, but so far they have not.

These examples suggest that some impor-tant emancipatory effects can be realisedwhen professionals do not monopolise socialdevelopment but they also hint at the fragi-lity of self-organisation. Rotterdam seems tobe in a limbo. On the one hand, self-organising residents have stepped in as thesocial state retreated. As welfare organisa-tions have dwindled and market-baseddevelopment projects were aborted, commu-nity engagement has been ‘crowded in’(cf. Ostrom, 2000). As the governmentbecomes dependent on communities to per-form key tasks, community members are in abetter position to push for the changes they liketo see and get meaningfully involved. On theother hand, self-organisation is in an importantpart predicated on the financial and profes-sional support that helps residents to financeactivities and cope with the more vicious prob-lems associated with self-organising in anurban context where community cohesion isnot self-evident. In opposition to the ‘crowdingout’ hypothesis, we might expect that engage-ment suffers when communities are left to ventfor themselves: if the state retreats further, somay residents. The challenge, then, is to openthe black box of self-organisation and discoverwhy networks come together or fall apart.

Politics, research, and the politicsof research

The research agenda outlined above has rele-vance for practitioners and therefore also for

policy makers. But ‘practice’ should not beconflated with ‘policy’. It seems that up untilnow self-organisation is, somewhat ironi-cally, to a large degree a government affairand a government goal. It has now becomecustomary for ministerial departments, localcouncils, and government advisors to declarethat they want to support citizen initiativesrather than impose plans of their own. Whilethe government sees itself as rigid, expensive,and inefficient, citizens are portrayed ascreative, flexible, and decisive. In spite of theself-flagellation in policy documents, thegovernment does afford itself an importantrole in stimulating self-organisation. In onebreath the government declares itself incap-able of fulfilling tasks associated with thesocial state and grants itself new legitimacyand functions with respect to the promotionof self-organisation in local communities(Rose, 1996; Uitermark, 2014).

In the policy field that unfolds aroundself-organisation, researchers take up a pro-minent position. In their reports, researcherssay that the government is too insensitiveand slow and they urge the government tobecome more inviting, sensitive and flexible.That sounds critical but often amounts toassisting the government’s self-flagellation.As modern-day Machiavellis, researchersassist the government in mapping out civilsociety and getting a better grip on whatgoes on there. Their advice on how to pro-mote and exploit self-organisation may beplausible but is symptomatic for a policyfixation among researchers. Going beyondthat policy fixation would bring at least twoadvantages.

The first advantage is that we can betterincorporate the uneven politics of promotingself-organisation. Since the government isfully committed to promoting self-organisa-tion, it has little interest in acknowledgingthat there will also be many instances wherecitizens left to vent for themselves will notbe able to do so. It more specifically has no




interest in highlighting its own role in facili-tating the initiatives of some (complacent orconstructive) citizens while obstructing theinitiatives of other (critical or stigmatised)citizens (Uitermark and Gielen, 2010).Attending to these issues helps to betterunderstand what happens at the interfacebetween government and civil society.

A second advantage of letting go of thepolicy fixation is that other parties than thegovernment could benefit from insights gainedthrough research. It is disturbingly paradoxicalthat in most of the literature on self-organisation the government is the defaultpoint of reference while self-organising citizensappear as a target group. It seems as if citizensare organising more, faster and better, and thattherefore the government has to receive adviceon how to catch up. But self-organisation ischallenging for people actually involved in theprocess. Whether one organises a hackerspaceor a neighbourhood watch, it is a challenge torecruit, connect, and coordinate volunteers.Given the challenging conditions communitygroups find themselves in, research into self-organisation should not primarily help thegovernment to deal with citizens who organisefaster, better, and more than before (they donot seem to do so) but should help citizens toorganise faster, better and more.

Conclusion

Self-organisation has long been a politicalideal but the ongoing budget cuts mean thatmore is at stake now. While self-organisation has always provided tangiblebenefits, it becomes more important as gov-ernments make communities responsible forthe provision of libraries, homework coun-selling, playgrounds, kindergartens, housingor elderly care. Self-organisation will bevitally important and that’s why we woulddo well to be curious about how it works.An exclusive focus on success stories mightbe inspiring but it will not lead to greater

understanding of self-organisation’s unevendevelopment and inner workings. The self-organising city will not evolve into aWikitopia where everyone contributesaccording to capacity and takes according toneed. Self-organisation among people is dif-ferent from self-organisation among insectsor cells. The self-organising city will some-times be a platform where different ideasand interests will harmoniously fall in placebut at other times it will be an arena wheredifferent ideas and interests come into colli-sion. Emphasising that self-organisation isnot always good and does not always suc-ceed does not imply criticism of self-organisation as such. To the contrary, self-organisation would not be exciting to doand research if success were guaranteed.

Acknowledgements

This paper is a revised version of the inaugural lec-ture ‘Verlangen naar Wikitopia’, delivered on 10January 2014 on the occasion of the installation ofJustus Uitermark as endowed professor of com-munity development at the Erasmus UniversityRotterdam. The author would like to thank Emiel

Rijshouwer, Anne van Summeren and the anon-ymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from anyfunding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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