Related projects
Mapping the civic is a practice with history and with neighbours: state censuses, academic databases, community wikis and activist atlases. This page gathers the projects doing something similar to CIVIBA, each with its actual state, because here too we prefer honesty over a decorative catalogue.
States and figures checked on 1 September 2026, by visiting each site.
Maps and censuses of places
The French state census of tiers-lieux: over 4,040 identified in 2026, through a 206-question survey covering governance, economy and land. The public grouping behind it was dissolved on 31 August 2026 after losing 90 per cent of its funding in two years. The map and the data remain online with no one to maintain them, and that nuance is exactly the kind of fact this atlas records.
Data: Open dataset on data.gouv.fr, Licence Ouverte 2.0, with a published schema.
The community wiki of the tiers-lieux: over 3,000 articles documenting places, methods and recipes with a digital commons logic. It is sustained by a small community of about fifteen active people, which is at once its charm and its fragility.
Data: Open wiki, editable with an account.
The Italian network of hybrid spaces born from the regeneration of disused buildings, with a directory and map of over one hundred member organisations according to its own website. It acts as the sector's voice before institutions.
The collaborative map of Ibero-American citizen initiatives: 6,186 across 72 cities according to its API, classified by theme, space, agent and SDG. It is one of the field's few projects with genuinely open data, with a public API under ODbL, though its code has seen no changes since 2023. The open self-mapping model, in its most generous version.
Data: Public API and data under ODbL 1.0; GPL-3.0 code.
The European network of cultural centres in repurposed buildings: over 180 organisations according to its own website, from factories to markets and barracks. Governed by a members' assembly since the eighties, its member directory is the best existing census of this family of places at European scale.
The citizen map of Germany's empty buildings, born from the cultural squat movement of Hamburg's Gängeviertel. Anyone can flag a vacant property to make visible what the market hides: the militant cartography of vacancy, the step before the reuse this atlas catalogues.
EcoHeritage · European Ecomuseums Network ↗
The directory of the European ecomuseums network: 84 registered at the time of checking, filterable by country and type. It was born from an Erasmus+ project, the same call-based funding pattern whose usual ending this page documents; for now it still stands.
Mapa nacional de kodomo shokudo (Gaccom y Musubie) ↗
The national map of children's community canteens, born from an alliance between a school data company and Musubie, the network that links them. It lists over 6,300 canteens per its 2024 note, against the 9,132 counted by the national survey: not even their coordinating network manages to map them all, and that gap says much about the scale of the phenomenon.
Banco nacional de casas vacías (akiya bank) ↗
The state aggregator of municipal vacant house and land banks, piloted in 2017 and running since 2018 through two real estate portals. It is the public infrastructure behind stories like Onomichi's: without this data plumbing, the community reuse of akiya does not scale.
Red mintosho de microbibliotecas ↗
The network of "everyone's libraries": tiny spaces where each neighbour rents a shelf box and lends their own books. Born in 2020 on a shopping street in Yaizu, its directory now counts over a hundred venues across Japan, with no official figure published. It is the vernacular third place being born in real time, replication system included.
Censo de kominkan (encuesta de educación social) ↗
Japan has censused its kominkan since 1949, the municipal civic halls for social education born from the postwar years: 13,798 according to the latest published triennial survey. It is probably the world's oldest running state census of civic infrastructure, and a reminder that counting community places is not a new idea.
The official map of Tokyo's public bath guild: 405 active sento as of the September 2026 check. A living cartography of a receding social infrastructure, the same one this atlas tells from the inside through places like Kosugiyu or Inari-yu.
An independent, nearly anonymous portal documenting 111 shopping streets across Japan, each with a map and a photographic walk. Included because it proves something this atlas stands for: the documentation of everyday places is also done out of amateur affection, with no institution behind it.
Case and process databases
The global database of participatory democracy: some 2,400 cases, 400 methods and 900 organisations, with open contribution and manual moderation of first publication. It is the field's academic reference and the only project on this page to have sustained both quality and volume for over a decade. It documents processes; this atlas documents places.
Data: CSV download and Dataverse with API, CC BY-NC-SA.
3,744 democratic innovations across 18 countries coded by an expert team using 43 variables, covering 1990 to 2020. The series was deliberately closed and remains browsable: an example of how to end a corpus well, in a field full of projects that fade without saying so.
The urban good practice bank of the European URBACT programme: 116 labelled in 2024, with entries designed to transfer from one city to another. An institutional lens, on a cycle tied to calls.
The global collection of technology for democracy: over 12,400 curated entries by its own counter, from participation tools to open data projects. A personal curation sustained for a decade, with a handover of stewardship announced in 2026: the editorial continuity problem, managed in the open.
New European Bauhaus, premios ↗
The awards platform of the New European Bauhaus initiative, with each edition's entries, finalists and winners browsable. A European institutional lens on projects crossing design, sustainability and inclusion; many of its laureates would fit as places in this atlas.
Commons and urban transformation
The laboratory that drafted the shared administration regulation for urban commons which Bologna approved in 2014, later adopted by hundreds of Italian municipalities. It publishes an annual report on collaboration pacts, but no browsable database or map: that open data gap is part of the landscape this atlas tries to offset.
Transformative Cities · Atlas of Utopias ↗
A narrative atlas of municipalist transformations in housing, water, energy and food, born from an award that ran four editions between 2018 and 2022. It is currently dormant awaiting a new edition, and its forty stories remain readable. Its format is the peer-reviewed long story, not the data record.
Over 15,000 articles on the commons and peer production accumulated across two decades. It is not a map: it is the field's conceptual encyclopaedia, today sustained almost single-handedly by its founder. The movement's largest archive, and also its reminder of what it takes to keep an editing community alive.
The academic laboratory of urban commons governance, built around the work of Christian Iaione and Sheila Foster, with a database of collaborative city cases. It bridges the practice this atlas maps and its legal theorisation; its database publishes no stable entry count.
A documentary platform of the commons movement: remixable multimedia archives, interviews and activist research projects, mostly in French. Not a map; the field's audiovisual memory.
Shareable · Sharing Cities Network ↗
From the first MapJam in 2013 came some seventy community maps of the sharing economy in cities across the world. The organisation is alive and publishing; the maps, by its own warning, are outdated. Included for that uncommon honesty: saying your map has aged is worth more than pretending otherwise.
Built public space and heritage
Sixteen European cases of community heritage reuse, documented with particular attention to the clash between legal frameworks and actual practice. The project ended with its funding in 2021 and the site remains as an archive: the usual fate of grant-cycle research.
European Prize for Urban Public Space ↗
The archive of the European Prize for Urban Public Space: candidate and awarded works since 2000, with 381 projects from 38 countries submitted in 2026. It looks at the built work more than at governance: the exact counter-shot of this atlas, which looks at who governs before what gets built.
Base infrastructure
The free cartographic infrastructure almost everything rests on, this atlas included: its tiles draw our maps and its geocoder verifies our coordinates. Its tags record over 219,000 community centres worldwide, with no editorial curation. There, everything fits; here, every entry is explained.
Data: Full data under ODbL, with downloads and an API.
The free territorial social network: citizen mapping infrastructure where a commune's actors (associations, projects, events) georeference one another. Free software governed by a cooperative; more foundation than atlas, hence this family.
The ones no longer with us
Closures teach too. In this field hardly any project dies of disinterest: it dies of a bill, of maintenance, or of losing its editing community. That is why this atlas is static, versioned and downloadable.
Mapping the Commons
An audiovisual cartography of the commons across six cities (Athens, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro and others), cited in academic literature for fifteen years. Its domain stopped resolving in 2026: nobody renewed a bill of a few euros.
TransforMap
The most ambitious attempt to federate alternative economies onto a single map, on top of OpenStreetMap. No traceable activity since 2017 or 2018: its main site barely survives and its forum no longer responds. It died of what federations usually die of: coordination.
Missing one?
If you maintain or know a civic cartography that belongs here, write to us through the contribution page.