Longing for Wikitopia: The study and politics of self-organisation

Abstract

Self-organisation is an idea whose time has come. As an explanatory concept, self-organisation is central to complexity theory, which is quickly becoming a powerful and perhaps even dominant paradigm in both the natural and social sciences. As a political ideal, self-organisation is filling the void 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 paper argues that self-organisation indeed is an inspiring ideal but that it is often misunderstood and may produce adverse consequences when used as a policy guide. While self-organisation is too inspiring to abandon, its harsh realities need to be accounted for if we want to think and work with it.

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Urban Studies
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ÓUrban Studies Journal Limited 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0042098015577334
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Longing for Wikitopia: The study
and politics of self-organisation
Justus Uitermark
University of Amsterdam and Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Abstract
Self-organisation is an idea whose time has come. As an explanatory concept, self-organisation is
central to complexity theory, which is quickly becoming a powerful and perhaps even dominant
paradigm in both the natural and social sciences. As a political ideal, self-organisation is filling the
void 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 paper
argues that self-organisation indeed is an inspiring ideal but that it is often misunderstood and
may produce adverse consequences when used as a policy guide. While self-organisation is too
inspiring to abandon, its harsh realities need to be accounted for if we want to think and work
with it.
Keywords
community, complexity theory, government, Internet, self-organisation
Received March 2014; accepted February 2015
The complex patterns insects produce are an
endless source of fascination for scientists.
Fireflies dance in amazing patterns and
switch on and off in perfect synchrony.
Ants, termites, and bees create structures
with a baffling architecture and use highly
advanced methods to locate and transport
food. The creations are so complex that it is
hard not to believe they are produced by
architects or designers, but reality is more
inspiring. There are no leaders or directors.
The impressive nests, the refined survival
strategies, the enchanting dances or the
sophisticated divisions of labour are not pro-
duced by design. The complex patterns are
emergent, they rise up out of distributed
local interactions; they result from self-
organisation. Self-organisation has emerged
as a central concept within science in recent
years. All sorts of complex structures – rang-
ing from brains to the economy – have been
analysed as the outcome of self-organisation
(e.g. Ball, 2013; Johnson, 2002; Kauffman,
1993).
Self-organisation has not only gained
ground as an explanatory concept but also
as a political ideal. The development of tech-
nologies for distributed communication has
reinvigorated 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: justusuitermark@hotmail.com
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to a central authority. Wikipedia is perhaps
the ultimate example. The online encyclopae-
dia is not created by experts but by hundreds
of thousands of volunteers who add or revise
topics on their own initiative, in effect creat-
ing the world’s biggest evolving repository of
human knowledge. Recent social movements
also embrace the ideal of self-organisation.
The web-based movement Anonymous, the
Occupy movement and the Spanish indigna-
dos all reject the delegation of power to lead-
ership and even question the very idea of
representation itself. As Manuel Castells
notes for the case of the indignados, this net-
worked movement ‘positioned itself against
intermediaries, be it political, media, or cul-
tural’ and he notes ‘a paradigm shift’ as the
movement seeks to be ‘created equally by
thousands of people’ each of whom speak
for themselves and for themselves only
(Toret quoted in Castells, 2012: 121).
Perhaps most strikingly, self-organisation
has also been embraced by governments.
The idea that state interventions should pri-
marily be aimed at strengthening civil society
rather than the state has become a mainstay
of international development (Watkins et
al., 2012) and more recently governments of
Western Europe have also accorded increas-
ingly important roles for local communities,
recasting them from parties for consultation
to prime drivers of social change. In the
United Kingdom, Cameron’s government
declared its opposition to ‘Big Government’
and support for a ‘Big Society’ composed of
empowered local communities (Cabinet
Office, 2010: 1). The Dutch cabinet states in
a recent position paper that society’s self-
organising capacities are growing (Ministry
of Interior Affairs, 2013) and believes, as per
King Willem’s by now infamous speech, that
the classic welfare state must transform into
a ‘participation society’. Just as citizens have
grown increasingly distrustful and critical of
governments, governments are increasingly
declaring their faith in citizens’ zeal and
creativity. Networked communities rather
than hierarchical states have come to be seen
as the source of welfare, prosperity, and
happiness.
By reporting from the trenches of the
‘participation society’ in the city of
Rotterdam, this paper follows in the tracks
of the social state to see what happens as it
retreats and mutates. Rather than opening
up a void free of state interference, we
observe the contradictory – clumsy, creative,
ferocious – reconfiguration of relationships
within communities and between commu-
nities and the government. This paper exam-
ines the uneven and contradictory
development of self-organisation but first
takes 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 both
explains and prescribes how societies, and
also cities, function. It has become common
to represent the city as akin to a biological
system with a natural order in which every
attempt at design or control is problematic
or destructive. This quote by the planner
Michael Batty, as cited by the physicist
Philip Ball (2013: 46), illustrates this well:
Planning, design, control, management – what-
ever constellation of interventionist perspec-
tives are adopted – are difficult and potentially
dangerous. If we assume that social systems
and cities [are] like biological systems .then
interventions are potentially destructive unless
we have a deep understanding of their causal
effects. As we have learned more, we become
wary 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 be
to discover their intrinsic bottom-up principles
of self-organization, and then to work with
those so as to guide the process along desir-
able routes, rather than trying to impose some
unreachable and unsustainable order and
structure. (Ball, 2013: 43)
It is important at this point to distinguish
the general concept of self-organisation and
the political ideal. As an explanatory con-
cept self-organisation accounts for the ways
in which social and natural life evolves. Self-
organisation thus understood can refer to
natural selection or bureaucracy running out
of control and it can refer to processes that
are benign or malign. However, self-
organisation has taken on a specific ideolo-
gical guise in recent scholarly literature and
policy statements. In this conception, an
arbitrary distinction is made between, on the
one hand, ‘the system’ with its endogenous
and ingenious principles of self-organisation
(i.e. the market and civil society) and, on the
other hand, ‘interventions’ as carried out by
some agent alien and exogenous to the sys-
tem (i.e. the state). Rather than conceiving
of the state as foundational or integral to
urban and social systems (Schinkel, 2012),
its role then becomes to foster and respect
the self-organising of communities and espe-
cially the market. Adopting a view of cities
as akin to biological systems distracts from
the wider political and economic forces that
determine the ground rules for urban devel-
opment and makes it possible to portray
even contested processes like gentrification
as ‘natural’ (Ball, 2014; for a critique see
Slater, 2014).
Although this governmentality is cloaked
in an antipolitical vocabulary (Rose, 2000:
1400), it mobilises enthusiasm and scepticism
in particular ways: while the logic through
which uncoordinated and individual deci-
sions produce social outcomes is readily
accepted as a consequence of intrinsic princi-
ples of self-organisation that have to be
respected, the logic through which collective
and coordinated decisions produce social
outcomes is suspect.
Thus emerges the ideal of the self-
organised city, a city where people are not
directed by central authorities but cooperate
voluntarily in communities and for the pub-
lic good. We might call that city Wikitopia,
an ideal city where bottom-up cooperation
coalesces into an ingenious and complex
social organisation. Reading recent policy
documents and media reports, one might get
the impression that the realisation of
Wikitopia is in process. Journalists, scholars
and government officials produce maga-
zines, blogs, and books with inspiring exam-
ples of people who organise their own care
provisions, generate their own energy, create
their own child care facilities, or farm their
own food. Neighbourhood centres run by
residents rather than welfare organisations
have become places of pilgrimage for gov-
ernment officials who have converted to the
faith in community power.
The idea that people creatively and har-
moniously create their city from the bottom-
up is indeed irresistible. The civic success
stories are a breath of fresh air for a society
desperate for new ways of organising soli-
darity and social relations. It would be a
mistake to view the longing for Wikitopia as
only the fig leaf for brutal budget cuts.
Wikitopia has political and ideological
appeal to both left and right as it promises
that the power invested in rigid institutions
will 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 volitional
solidarity found in anarchism, libertarianism
or socialism and in Christian and other reli-
gions. From the hypermodern cybernetics
movement to groups aspiring to go back to
nature, self-organisation features strongly in
projections of an alternative social order.
Initiatives that operate without market
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incentives or state imposition can be
regarded as ‘real utopias’ that prefigure
what alternative ways of organising social
relations and solidarity might look like
(Wright, 2013).
At the same time, the government’s ideali-
sation of citizens and the boasting about
civic power raises suspicions. It is narcissistic
to only see the power and beauty of civil
society. The idealisation of citizens – by gov-
ernments and occasionally by citizens them-
selves – betrays a lack of real curiosity and
true commitment as it is blind to self-organi-
sation’s weaknesses and darker side. Michael
Batty is certainly right when he says, as
quoted above, that government intervention
is ‘difficult and potentially dangerous’ but
this is just as well true of self-organisation
and policies aiming to harness self-organisa-
tion. Just as the state can fail, so can the
market, and so can civil society.
The challenge is to walk on the fine line
between, on the one hand, denouncing the
ideal of self-organisation as a fig leaf for
cold-hearted austerity and, on the other
hand, celebrating self-organisation as an
infallible or inescapable principle of govern-
ment (North, 2011). What we need to do
instead is to cultivate curiosity and commit-
ment. This requires, on the one hand, a dis-
tanced, macroscopic view that allows us to
map and explain broad patterns. On the
other hand, it requires a microscopic view to
examine what goes on within self-organising
networks.
A macroscopic view
With a macroscopic view we can examine
where self-organisation takes off and where
it does not. In recent years, researchers have
shown that self-organisation develops stron-
ger in some than in other areas. Robert
Putnam 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 also
shows the uneven distribution of self-organi-
sation. Initiatives like charity benefits or pro-
test actions are much more present in some
than in other neighbourhoods (Sampson,
2012). What explains this uneven develop-
ment? Although research shows that eco-
nomically deprived and ethnically diverse
areas score relatively low, residential compo-
sition does not fully account for the geogra-
phical differences. More important than the
background characteristics of the population
is the institutional tissue of associations and
foundations that enable people to connect
(Putnam, 1993; Sampson, 2012). Walter
Nicholls (2009) calls places where this tissue
is strongly developed relational incubators.
The city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands
is one interesting case for examining self-
organisation – here colloquially understood
as collective action by citizens that is not
directed by the government – because coop-
eration towards a common cause is far from
trivial here. Rotterdam has become known
in the Netherlands and in the academic liter-
ature as a city where revanchist sentiments
have been forcefully expressed (Van den
Berg, 2012; Van Eijk, 2010). Anxieties about
the discontents of multicultural society are
now compounded by concerns over austerity
measures. As in other countries, the Dutch
government simultaneously cuts budgets
and delegates responsibilities to municipal
governments. Considering the magnitude of
the budget cuts, municipal governments are
reconsidering their own role. On the one
hand, they are tightening their grip on
groups subjected to workfare policies. On
the other hand, municipalities are now more
eagerly than before looking for ways to give
communities the space they need to provide
services through mutual support and gener-
alised reciprocity. This longing for a more
Wikitopian city is not mere veneer for dra-
conic budget-cuts but also expresses widely
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felt discontents with state-delivered services
which are believed – not just by governments
or parties on the right – to have alienated
people by considering them as customers or
target groups rather than constituents. One
important question, however, is where and
how communities can and do self-organise.
A first insight into Rotterdam’s varie-
gated geography of self-organising capacity
can be gleaned from Rotterdam’s Social
Index survey. Respondents were asked if
they take care of less able people, improve
their neighbourhood in some way, and work
as volunteers. When the answers are scaled
and expressed as grades, the poor and ethni-
cally diverse neighbourhoods of Bloemhof,
Tussendijken and Bospolder would not pass
the test while the more affluent and homoge-
neous neighbourhoods of Hillegersberg-
Schiebroek and Hoek van Holland score
high grades. The first impression these fig-
ures give is in line with Robert Putnam’s
finding that deprived and diverse neighbour-
hoods do not do well.
However, when we look at neighbour-
hood data rather than aggregated individual
data, a very different pattern comes up. A
survey of Rotterdam’s civil initiatives shows
a surprisingly even distribution: all city dis-
tricts have between 200 and 300 citizen
initiatives (Schinkel et al., 2010). A plausible
explanation for this pattern is that
Rotterdam has a highly developed city-wide
infrastructure for community development.
From the 1980s onwards, the municipality
has invested in umbrella organisations and
professional support for residents, immi-
grants, women and other groups
(Uitermark, 2012). Through that infrastruc-
ture the Rotterdam government has rolled
out city-wide community development pro-
grammes, with the so-called Opzoomeren as
iconic example. Opzoomeren was invented
when residents in the run-down
Opzoomerstraat decided to work collectively
to make the street clean and friendly by
sweeping the street and planting flowers.
The municipality scaled this initiative up to
the entire city and since the 1990s hundreds
of street groups throughout Rotterdam par-
ticipate in Opzoomeren. More recently the
activities of Opzoomeren have been
expanded to Dutch language lessons and
reading sessions which are now organised
throughout Rotterdam with financial and
professional support from the municipality.
These kinds of community development pro-
grammes are strongly associated with the
social state; they are centrally coordinated,
standardised, and rely on public funds and
professional support.
The government in the ‘participation
society’ demands more and gives less.
Citizens are expected to play key roles in
providing their own provisions. One impor-
tant example is public libraries. In the
United Kingdom, hundreds of public
libraries have closed but also many new
community-run libraries have been estab-
lished. In Rotterdam, the government
decided to close down 14 out of the 21
libraries in 2011. In response to the closure
of the public library in their neighbourhood,
two sociologists and active residents, Joke
van der Zwaard and Maurice Specht
founded the Reading Salon West, a vibrant
place where people read, work, take Dutch
lessons, organise meetings, and perform
poetry or music. The Reading Salon became
one of those places of pilgrimage for govern-
ment officials as it supposedly demonstrates
that unsubsidised volunteers are better capa-
ble of creating vibrant neighbourhood
spaces than publicly funded officials.
However, there is more to the success
story than the ingenuity and commitment of
the Reading Salon’s founders. The Reading
Salon could emerge in this neighbourhood
because of the strong institutional tissue that
had historically developed around the
Aktiegroep Oude Westen (Van der Zwaard
and Specht, 2013). The networks that had
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been cultivated through the Aktiegroep
enabled the Reading Salon’s founders to
reach out to potential volunteers and mobi-
lise people to design, maintain, and operate
the space. This helps us understand why in
all the other 14 neighbourhoods where pub-
lic libraries had to close, residents have not
successfully taken initiatives to create
community-run libraries. Organising an ini-
tiative like the Reading Salon requires
immense effort from dozens or even hun-
dreds of people volunteering their time and
coordinating their activities. In the absence
of strong and dense pre-existing networks,
undertaking an enterprise of this magnitude
is too much even for very committed and
skilful initiators.
Not only social but also economic capital
is unevenly distributed and such inequality is
likely to increasingly translate into uneven
service provision as the state delegates its
responsibilities. Celebrated forms of self-
organisation like cooperatives in the field of
care, housing construction, or renewable
energy emerge where people are well-
organised and can afford the necessary
investments. Elanor Ostrom’s research that
is often used to underscore the value and fea-
sibility of self-organisation suggests that
robust forms of common resource manage-
ment benefit from homogeneity among par-
ticipants and the possibility of excluding of
outsiders (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 of
an operation to upgrade the neighbourhood
of Spangen, the Rotterdam municipality
bought an entire housing complex and gave
it for free to a cooperation of aspiring home-
owners on the condition that they would
renovate the buildings. The project has been
widely cited as an inspiring example of colla-
borative and bottom-up initiative. It did
indeed provide tangible benefits for the
group 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 for
people unable to finance a major renovation.
These examples illustrate that community
life may surge where the government
devolves responsibilities and assets to com-
munities but they also illustrate that this is a
highly uneven process. A research agenda
into global patterns of self-organisation
should not only examine success stories but
all cases to search for underlying factors that
account for self-organising or the lack
thereof. It is important to acknowledge that
residents in one neighbourhood created a
very successful initiative in response to the
closure of their neighbourhood library but it
is equally important to recognise that this is
exceptional as no community initiatives
emerged in 13 other neighbourhoods where
public libraries closed. If we take a broad
look, we find that self-organisation is
unevenly distributed across countries, cities,
and neighbourhoods. This makes it all the
more interesting and urgent to investigate
the geographical distribution of self-
organisation and explain why some areas
fare 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 not
a pure expression of these conditions. People
who organise and take initiatives try to beat
the odds and outmanoeuvre conditions hin-
dering them. This is a fascinating process
exactly because it is difficult. People are not
fire flies, bees or ants. While those insects
know their place instinctively, self-
organisation among people is even in the
best cases the result of struggle and trial and
error (see Harvey, 2000). When we take a
microscopic view of self-organisation, we do
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not observe the seamless confluence of pre-
programmed elements but different charac-
ters and interests which sometimes creatively
merge but at other times tragically crash.
Let’s look at one spectacular example by
way of illustration – the Burning Man festi-
val that takes place each year in the Black
Rock Desert in Nevada. The festival is
inspired by the philosophy that visitors are
not passive consumers but active partici-
pants who co-produce performances, make
sculptures, offer massages, and play music.
Goods and services are not traded but
exchanged through a gift economy. Burning
Man is a sort of Wikitopia. The festival site
is a makeshift city where tens of thousands
of visitors each decide on their own initiative
what they do or contribute. But looking
from above, it becomes apparent that these
chaotic and creative interactions take place
within a clear structure reflecting classic
hierarchical steering (Figure 1). Initially
Burning Man was radically unstructured but
as 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 a
director was put in charge to streamline
coordination and a range of restrictions
were imposed on participants to prevent
incidents (Chen, 2009). The organisation
attempts to be radically inclusive but to do
so it paradoxically has to make stipulations
and impose restrictions.
That even Burning Man adopts hierarchi-
cal steering and takes on the form of a cor-
porate entity is suggestive of the limitations
and contradictions of self-organisation.
While exclusion, power concentration, and
bureaucratisation 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, these
tendencies can emerge from self-organisa-
tion. This is also the case for perhaps the
most iconic example of the power of self-
organisation, Wikipedia. As pointed out in
the introduction, Wikipedia is an impressive
and inspiring example of self-organisation
but a closer look at the online encyclopaedia
reveals that cooperation and coordination
among the hundreds of thousands of
volunteers requires considerable work. Self-
organisation is facilitated by a formal orga-
nisation, the Wikimedia Foundation, that
maintains servers, fights legal battles, raises
funds, and develops software. Wikimedia
also struggles with tendencies towards
bureaucratisation and exclusion. In their
efforts to work efficiently and conscien-
tiously, Wikipedia editors have developed
jargon, acronyms, and rules that come
across to outsiders as obscure and secretive
language. That secretive language has not
been 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 more
senior editors or automated content manage-
ment systems (so-called ‘bots’) (Rijshouwer
and Uitermark, 2014). Wikipedia and
Burning Man are spectacular and inspiring
examples of self-organisation but those suc-
cess stories are exceptional and moreover
ambivalent. While many commentators give
the 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 would
like (Freeman, 1973). Exactly because self-
organising networks lack central oversight
and people do not know their place instinc-
tively, it is a matter of struggle and improvi-
sation to bring divergent ideals and interests
in line (Boutellier, 2011).
This process of struggle and negotiation
is especially challenging in urban areas
characterised by deprivation and competing
demands from diverse groups on limited
space. Schipper’s (2014) ethnography of a
resident-run community centre in
Rotterdam provides one interesting exam-
ple. The centre used to be managed by a wel-
fare foundation until budget cuts forced it to
close in 2012. The building remained vacant
for almost two years until a group of neigh-
bourhood residents occupied it. While
before the centre had been run by profes-
sionals, after its relaunch it developed a cul-
ture of cooperation underpinned by active
participation and now provides space to
Turkish and Moroccan women learning to
mend clothing, Polish and Dutch residents
exchanging language lessons, former prison-
ers reintegrating into mainstream society by
assisting activities, pensioned artisans doing
repairs, and clients of labour market reinte-
gration programmes. The residents ritually
reiterate 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 difference
is that residents are now in charge and that
they have a diverse yet connected constitu-
ency of user groups. However, a challenge
the residents face is that the government will
increase the rent to ‘commercial’ levels after
two years because it feels its task is only to
help 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 the
way – difficult to find in this deprived
neighbourhood.
Van Summeren’s (2012) case study of a
community garden provides another inter-
esting glance into the micro-dynamics of
self-managed spaces. The community garden
she researched has been created on a vacant
lot of land that had not been developed
because of the financial crisis, providing one
example of how aborted projects created
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new spaces for civic engagement. Creatief
Beheer, the organisation managing the space
for the government, receives funds from the
municipal budget for physical management
but it opts for a more community-based
approach as it employs gardeners who are
expected to cultivate the land and to culti-
vate community in the process – a practice
Gilchrist (2000: 269) refers to as ‘human hor-
ticulture’. Creatief Beheer radically embraces
the principle of openness and refuses to erect
fences, use surveillance cameras or regulate
access through identification cards. This phi-
losophy goes against the intuition of many
neighbourhood residents using the garden.
They pressure the professionals to regulate
access and enforce rules but Creatief Beheer
categorically rejects these demands.
Although this strategy is not without its
costs, Van Summeren’s (2012) research
suggests that it may be successful. Her net-
work analysis shows that the users of the
garden segregate into different clusters but
these clusters are connected through brokers
who mediate potentially conflictive relations
(Figure 2). The biggest node in Figure 2 is a
professional working for Creatief Beheer,
which indicates that she is an important bro-
ker between individuals. However, she is
strongly connected to adults with mostly
Dutch backgrounds while having no direct
connections to a group of neighbourhood
youngsters with mostly foreign back-
grounds, represented by the tightly con-
nected yet somewhat isolated cluster at the
top of Figure 2. A youngster of Turkish des-
cent, represented by the second biggest node
in the middle of the figure, forms a bridge
between the adults and youngsters. Since this
youngster 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 enlisted
volunteers and carved out a space for the
youngsters to participate. The network is
nevertheless fragile; relations are dispropor-
tionally formed around a professional and
there are only few linkages among segre-
gated groups. Given the likely prospect of
further budget cuts, the hope is that resi-
dents will self-organise as a community to
manage the garden, but so far they have not.
These examples suggest that some impor-
tant emancipatory effects can be realised
when professionals do not monopolise social
development but they also hint at the fragi-
lity of self-organisation. Rotterdam seems to
be in a limbo. On the one hand, self-
organising residents have stepped in as the
social state retreated. As welfare organisa-
tions have dwindled and market-based
development projects were aborted, commu-
nity engagement has been ‘crowded in’
(cf. Ostrom, 2000). As the government
becomes dependent on communities to per-
form key tasks, community members are in a
better position to push for the changes they like
to see and get meaningfully involved. On the
other hand, self-organisation is in an important
part predicated on the financial and profes-
sional support that helps residents to finance
activities and cope with the more vicious prob-
lems associated with self-organising in an
urban context where community cohesion is
not self-evident. In opposition to the ‘crowding
out’ hypothesis, we might expect that engage-
ment suffers when communities are left to vent
for themselves: if the state retreats further, so
may residents. The challenge, then, is to open
the black box of self-organisation and discover
why networks come together or fall apart.
Politics, research, and the politics
of research
The research agenda outlined above has rele-
vance for practitioners and therefore also for
policy makers. But ‘practice’ should not be
conflated with ‘policy’. It seems that up until
now self-organisation is, somewhat ironi-
cally, to a large degree a government affair
and a government goal. It has now become
customary for ministerial departments, local
councils, and government advisors to declare
that they want to support citizen initiatives
rather than impose plans of their own. While
the government sees itself as rigid, expensive,
and inefficient, citizens are portrayed as
creative, flexible, and decisive. In spite of the
self-flagellation in policy documents, the
government does afford itself an important
role in stimulating self-organisation. In one
breath the government declares itself incap-
able of fulfilling tasks associated with the
social state and grants itself new legitimacy
and functions with respect to the promotion
of self-organisation in local communities
(Rose, 1996; Uitermark, 2014).
In the policy field that unfolds around
self-organisation, researchers take up a pro-
minent position. In their reports, researchers
say that the government is too insensitive
and slow and they urge the government to
become more inviting, sensitive and flexible.
That sounds critical but often amounts to
assisting the government’s self-flagellation.
As modern-day Machiavellis, researchers
assist the government in mapping out civil
society and getting a better grip on what
goes on there. Their advice on how to pro-
mote and exploit self-organisation may be
plausible but is symptomatic for a policy
fixation among researchers. Going beyond
that policy fixation would bring at least two
advantages.
The first advantage is that we can better
incorporate the uneven politics of promoting
self-organisation. Since the government is
fully committed to promoting self-organisa-
tion, it has little interest in acknowledging
that there will also be many instances where
citizens left to vent for themselves will not
be able to do so. It more specifically has no
10 Urban Studies
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interest in highlighting its own role in facili-
tating the initiatives of some (complacent or
constructive) citizens while obstructing the
initiatives of other (critical or stigmatised)
citizens (Uitermark and Gielen, 2010).
Attending to these issues helps to better
understand what happens at the interface
between government and civil society.
A second advantage of letting go of the
policy fixation is that other parties than the
government could benefit from insights gained
through research. It is disturbingly paradoxical
that in most of the literature on self-
organisation the government is the default
point of reference while self-organising citizens
appear as a target group. It seems as if citizens
are organising more, faster and better, and that
therefore the government has to receive advice
on how to catch up. But self-organisation is
challenging for people actually involved in the
process. Whether one organises a hackerspace
or a neighbourhood watch, it is a challenge to
recruit, connect, and coordinate volunteers.
Given the challenging conditions community
groups find themselves in, research into self-
organisation should not primarily help the
government to deal with citizens who organise
faster, better, and more than before (they do
not seem to do so) but should help citizens to
organise faster, better and more.
Conclusion
Self-organisation has long been a political
ideal but the ongoing budget cuts mean that
more is at stake now. While self-
organisation has always provided tangible
benefits, it becomes more important as gov-
ernments make communities responsible for
the provision of libraries, homework coun-
selling, playgrounds, kindergartens, housing
or elderly care. Self-organisation will be
vitally important and that’s why we would
do well to be curious about how it works.
An exclusive focus on success stories might
be inspiring but it will not lead to greater
understanding of self-organisation’s uneven
development and inner workings. The self-
organising city will not evolve into a
Wikitopia where everyone contributes
according to capacity and takes according to
need. Self-organisation among people is dif-
ferent from self-organisation among insects
or cells. The self-organising city will some-
times be a platform where different ideas
and interests will harmoniously fall in place
but at other times it will be an arena where
different ideas and interests come into colli-
sion. Emphasising that self-organisation is
not 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 do
and research if success were guaranteed.
Acknowledgements
This paper is a revised version of the inaugural lec-
ture ‘Verlangen naar Wikitopia’, delivered on 10
January 2014 on the occasion of the installation of
Justus Uitermark as endowed professor of com-
munity development at the Erasmus University
Rotterdam. 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 any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-
for-profit sectors.
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