The neighbourhood budget

A hundred coins of a hundred million tomans each: ten billion tomans. The number comes from no budget line; it is an estimate of what it would be if a tenth of each neighbourhood's development share of its district budget were put to the residents' vote. The Tehran municipality had a budget of about a hundred and fifty thousand billion tomans in 1403, sixty-four percent of it for development; a southern district like District 14 had a thousand billion tomans, and the city has three hundred and fifty-two neighbourhoods.

Eight trays face you, and each builds something with ten coins: a playground, five hundred metres of pavement, a hundred and fifty trees. The prices come from municipal contracts and the market of 1403, rounded. Every coin you put here is not somewhere else; that is what separates this from a poll.

The neighbourhood councils were created by a resolution of the Tehran city council in Aban 1378: in every neighbourhood seven members and four alternates, directly elected by the residents, advisory and supervisory. The fifth round was held in Tir 1398 for three hundred and fifty-two neighbourhoods, and three thousand five hundred and forty people were elected. The council has no budget; it gives its view, follows up, and the district municipality decides. This experience takes place in a free Iran: a neighbourhood council that really owns these ten billion; today's council shows why it does not exist yet.

What the municipality can spend on is what belongs to it: streets and pavements, parks and trees, lighting, the neighbourhood house, the market, safe crossings. What it cannot: water and sewage (the water company), gas and electricity (their own companies), schools and teachers (the education ministry), clinics (the health ministry). That is why the pipes tray is here: many of a neighbourhood's wishes lie outside the reach of whoever sits at the neighbourhood's ballot box.

Participatory budgeting began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989: neighbourhood assemblies ranked the city's capital share and the city council closed it. Since 2014 Paris has put about five percent of the city's capital budget, nearly a hundred million euros a year, to the residents' vote; anyone can propose and vote, of any age and with any passport.

In Iran a few municipalities have tried it, from Tehran's districts to middle-sized cities, and almost all stayed at consultation: people named priorities, and no share tied to their vote was defined. The distance from «give your view» to «spend it yourself» is the distance this experience wants to show.

The pipes tray is there to show something that happens in real meetings too: a neighbourhood's first wish is often something the municipality has no authority over. The coins you put on it return to the purse in this experience; in reality they turn into a letter to the water company that may get an answer three years later.

The story «Our alley's budget» in the experience «How are we all doing?» tells this very scene from 1415: the playground by seven votes. Here your vote is compared with the average of the hundred and fifty people before you, and everyone who comes after you sees you in the average too.