About the atlas
The name
CIVIBA joins the civic, from the Latin civicus, what belongs to the citizenry, with ba (場), taken from Ikujiro Nonaka's theory of knowledge creation: the shared context in motion where knowledge emerges, is shared and becomes collective action.
A ba is not a point on the map. It can be physical, relational or mental, and what defines it is not its walls but the relationship it sustains. Everyday Japanese carries it inside the words that name the spots where people gather.
Civiba: civic + ba (場), the shared context where the commons emerge.
Method
The atlas looks at three things at once: civic places, the civic practices that sustain them, and the events where the people who make them meet. A typology such as machizukuri or civic food is as much a practice as the family of places it produces.
Places split into projects (an initiative with a name and people behind it) and spaces (those with a door you can turn up at, from a single room to a whole village). Events live in the agenda: conferences, festivals, schools and triennials, with their open calls and the deadlines, which close months ahead. It is the leg that helps you plan the year. See the agenda →
This is not a directory of good practices nor a ranking: it is a cartography of territorial collective intelligence. Each place states who leads it, what real level of participation it has and what state it is in. Historic, already closed cases and cases with tensions are included, with the tensions told.
Every relevant fact needs a source with a consultation date. What is not yet contrasted is published marked as unverified, in plain sight: we prefer the honesty of the verification status to the appearance of completeness. Today the atlas holds 303 places and is in its starting phase, with verification ahead.
How to cite
CIVIBA. Democracy and Civic Practices. An atlas of projects, spaces and events. Domenico Di Siena, 2026. https://civiba.com · Data under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Licenses
The data is open, under CC BY-SA 4.0: you can reuse it citing the source and sharing alike. Cited sources and images keep their own rights.