Listen: Civic Crowdfunding

I was interviewed for the ABC radio program Future Tense on the perils and promise of civic crowdfunding, along with Bryan Boyer and Rodrigo Davies.

Crowd-funding is all the rage. Online, people donate to all manner of projects and inventions. But could the crowd-funding approach be scaled up? Could you, for instance, crowd-fund the construction of a community hall or a public swimming pool?

Well, they have with the former and they’re trying with the latter. It’s called ‘civic-crowd-funding’ and its proponents see it as a way of meeting community needs in an age of shrinking government expenditure.

But how realistic is it? And does it simply allow governments to abrogate their civic responsibilities?

For my previous thoughts on the topic read Against Kickstarter Urbanism and Why Building A Park Takes More Than Crowdfunding.

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