CIVIBADemocracy and Civic Practices

場 · How it is made and who makes it

About CIVIBA

An open atlas of projects and spaces, with an events agenda and a training section, on democracy and civic practices. Here you will find who makes it, where the name comes from and how each fact is checked.

projects
122
spaces
182
upcoming events
71
programmes
45
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Domenico Di Siena, with thick-rimmed glasses and a greying beard, arms crossed, wearing a black T-shirt with a blue cat.
years of practice
20+
countries
20+
people trained since 2015
1,000+

Who makes it

I am Domenico Di Siena

I run Multiprecio, a neighbourhood coworking space in Benimaclet, Valencia, and I am Community & Membership Lead at Democratic Society. They are two scales of the same question: what it takes for people to decide on and care for something in common, in a neighbourhood shopfront or in a European network.

I am an architect and civic designer. I work with institutions, public administrations and European consortia on the design of physical and digital infrastructures for public and social innovation. I co-founded CivicWise, and the book Diseño Cívico is in the final stage of production.

CIVIBA grew out of that practice, with a simple idea: that people who travel can discover projects and spaces that usually stay outside the common circuits. For now it is a personal project. I curate it, and what goes in and what stays out is my own judgement.

Where I stand

An atlas curated by one person is not neutral, and it is worth knowing that. I work at Democratic Society and I co-founded CivicWise. My two Civic Design courses, paid and on Udemy, are listed in Training, and their entries say so. The only thing CIVIBA charges for today is featured events, marked as advertising, and I invoice them as a self-employed professional.

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 sorts what it documents into projects (practices, programmes, networks, platforms and regulations) and spaces (those with a door you can turn up at, from a single room to a whole village). Events live in the agenda, with their open calls and deadlines, which close months ahead. See the agenda →

This is not a directory of good practices nor a ranking. Each entry says who leads it, what real level of participation it has and what state it is in. Closed cases and cases with tensions are included, and the tensions are named.

Every relevant fact carries a source and a consultation date. Today there are 304 entries from 6 countries: 202 verified and 102 partial, with the status always in plain sight. I prefer that honesty to the appearance of completeness.

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.