JONATHAN BROWN Friday 02 May 2014 If the urban planners had had their way in the 1960s motorway traffic would have thundered along elevated highways above the streets of Liverpool on its way to the Mersey docks. Luckily it never happened. Today all that is left of that brutal concrete vision are two inner city […]

Local authorities in London have announced a partnership which will see them help raise money for regeneration schemes through a crowdsourcing website. London Councils, the representative body for all 32 boroughs in the capital, will promote the Spacehive website which helps unlock funds for civic projects. The site gathers funds from members of the public, […]

Wednesday 5th June 2013 in Rossendale GREEN campaigners have received £4,026 in donations to help transform a Rawtenstall beauty spot. Incredible Edible Rossendale (IER) is to convert a disused animal enclosure, in Whitaker Park, which closed in 2011 as part of council cuts, to a family picnic area. Through Spacehive, a crowdfunding website created specifically […]

We ask two local government experts to argue the pros and cons of using crowdfunding to boost budgets Ben Matthews and Paul Taylor guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 May 2013 16.50 BST George Ferguson, the Bristol mayor, thinks crowdfunding can be beneficial to local communities. Photograph: Bristol city council Local authorities are using innovative measures to raise money. […]

NAMES, wedding dates and declarations of love cover the Luchtsingel, a new pedestrian walkway straddling a busy main road in central Rotterdam, a Dutch city. Asked by a website to help fund the project, locals paid €25 ($32) each for the right to etch a message on one of its 17,000 wooden planks.

The walkway’s length, they were warned, depended on the volume of donations. Within three months do-gooders had stumped up a third of the cash needed to build its full 350-metre span (a government award has since topped that up). Had they left council bean-counters to plan it, says Kristian Koreman, its architect, Rotterdam’s residents might have waited two decades to get their bridge off the ground.