Choose Your Neighbours: Decentralised Urban Planning at the Borderland with Rosa and Zoe

Mar 9, 2026

A conversation about designing decentralised neighbour relations and why plazas and plazas-that-emerge matter. They describe pre-placement matchmaking and six-week processes that shift people from competing for space to co-creating shared areas. Stories surface about straight-line maps vs desire paths, playful authority like the “GPS stick,” shepherds for neighbourhood care, drone aftermath maps, and experiments to nudge cooperation.

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ADVICE

Deploy Shepherds To Steward Neighbourhood Cohesion

Try appointing local shepherds (stewards) per area to help neighbours align on layout, safety and shared activities.
Rosa plans shepherds to act as contact people and nudge cohesion without top-down enforcement.

INSIGHT

Resistance Often Comes From Overwhelm Not Rejection

Emotional resistance to decentralisation often stems from overwhelm and fear of unpredictability, not pure opposition.
Zoe observed that people default to 'no' because engaging decentralised processes feels effortful and uncertain.

INSIGHT

Surrendering Control Produces Ownership And Care

Letting people fill in details via a designed process creates ownership and care even if organisers relinquish control.
Rosa: ownership makes participants attend to small details and look after each other during the week.

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🔗 The Membership Spring Sale for Borderland 2026 is on Tuesday March 10 17:00 CET! More information here: ⁠⁠https://talk.theborderland.se/main/⁠⁠

In this episode, Zoe sits down with Rosa to unpack what it was like co-leading Placement at Borderland (the “not-festival” where you buy a membership, not a ticket). They zoom in on a very microsolidarity-flavoured question:

How do you build trust and coordination in a huge, decentralised event without sliding into top-down control?

Rosa brings an urban planning lens (citizen engagement, bottom-up design, “desire paths”), and Zoe brings lived experience of arriving to Borderland overwhelmed, then gradually learning how the whole system actually works.

Together they tell the story of how Placement evolved from “first-come-first-served” into something more human: plazas, neighbourhoods, pre-placement, and now “shepherds” (stewards) to help camps connect more with their neighbours.

They talk about:

Realities vs Dreams at Borderland, and why “LARPing an office” can still be playful
Why camp conflicts often come down to neighbours (sound, vibe, rhythm), not “prime real estate”
How pre-placement shifts the mindset from competing for square meters to co-creating shared areas
The emotional side of decentralisation: why people say “no” first (overwhelm, control, uncertainty)
A concrete story of a plaza that only worked once people loosened their grip on “straight lines”
“Aftermath” drone maps and what they reveal about how people actually move and gather
Power, roles, and the “GPS Stick of Truth” (and how Borderland lets you play with authority instead of hiding it)If you’re into microsolidarity, this is a practical case study in designing at various scales (plazas, neighbourhoods, local stewardship) that make large-scale self-organisation feel more like a living system.

Links that were mentioned:

Rosa (Instagram): ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/streets.stockholm⁠⁠

⁠⁠studiodanenberg.com⁠⁠

Zoe (youtube): ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@softaccess⁠⁠

⁠⁠https://softaccess.org/about⁠⁠

Microsolidarity: ⁠⁠https://www.microsolidarity.cc/⁠⁠

💬 What’s your best (or worst) neighbour story from a co-created event? And what micro-structures have helped you trust strangers faster?