POC The Saillysienne Factory
Citizens’ Initiative Local Factory
The adventure began 3 years ago, at the end of the film screening “Tomorrow”, with a question raised by many saillyssians: what do we do? Since then, the municipality of Sailly-Lez-lannoy, a metropolitan city of less than 2,000 people, has been accompanying citizen initiatives through workshops, wherein citizens propose ideas that are then put into action and turned into projects, in co-construction with elected facilitators.
The Saillysienne Factory, carpooling 
The Saillysienne Factory, participatory gardens
A social innovation laboratory village
The Saillysienne Factory was set up in 2017 in an agile and empirical way. The approach is simple and practical: whether you feel like a resident, a citizen or an elected official, you are, in your own way, affected by the future of the village and the construction of a common life. The Factory facilitates initiative and self-organisation, encourages creativity and innovation. The operational charter, defined early in the project, is fundamental for its horizontal governance. This village laboratory is formed by contributors-actors in an open collective, and its success depends on the flow of information and its fast implementation, in order to match the availability of participants.
Collective and collaborative results
As months pass by, outcomes take up all communal fields as they multiply: twinning, participatory permaculture gardens, collective composting, film debates, book boxes, magazine boxes, the installation of 5 beehives, zero waste workshops that teach you how to do it yourself, alternative mobility work, pedibuses, short distance carpooling projects… The adventure is not easy, it lacks means and clashes with conservative sensibilities and institutional mechanisms, it involves risk-taking and can lead to misunderstanding participants’ motivations. The Factory might not develop exceptional or spectacular actions, but it does find ways to start collective actions on the territory.
- Project holders: voluntary elected officials, referent citizens for each project
- Designers: Mourad Oural for the diagnosis of La Fabrique within the framework of WDC, Vincent Dupont Rougier for carpooling
- Stakeholders: the Microstop association, local residents who contributed intermittently
- Photo credits: voluntary elected officials, referent citizens for each project, POC The Saillysienne Factory