From Projects to Problems: A Deweyan Analysis of Participatory Budgeting R. W. Hildreth and Steven A. Miller I. Introduction Chicago changed John Dewey. The most important source of this change was his interaction with Jane Addams and her work at Hull House. Through Addams, Dewey rethought what it meant to be a philosopher, shifting from com- menting on philosophical works to actively engaging the world and its problems. Addams saw Hull House both as a vehicle to do practical work on the city’s pressing social issues and as a sociology laboratory. According to Louis Menand, Dewey’s University Laboratory School was inspired by what he had seen at Hull House. Rather than serving as a sociology laboratory, it would be a place to enact and test educational philosophy. 1 As Robert Westbrook notes, these experiences convinced Dewey of “the superiority of politically and socially engaged philosophy to ... arid scholasticism.” 2 This spirit of active democratic experimentation is alive and well in con- temporary Chicago, exemplified by its pioneering implementation of participa- tory budgeting (PB) in the United States. Commonly defined as “a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget,” 3 PB is widely seen as one of the most important innovations in political practice in recent years. Since Brazilian experiments in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this practice has spread to more than 1,500 municipalities worldwide. 4 And it has been recommended as a “best practice” for development and local governing by the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the United Nations. 5 Most importantly, PB stands as a practical exception, challenge, and alternative to representative models of democracy. PB in Chicago is limited to resource allocation through the city’s Alder- manic Menu Program. Each of Chicago’s fifty ward aldermen has more than a million dollars in yearly discretionary spending for capital projects. In 2009, after attending the United States Social Forum, 49th Ward Alderman Joseph Moore implemented PB to give citizens power to determine how these funds are spent. Since that time, PB in the United States has expanded to eight other wards in Chicago; to select council districts in New York City, St. Louis, Long Beach, San Juan in Puerto Rico, and San Francisco; and city-wide in Vallejo, California and Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts. PB initiatives that focus exclusively on incorporating young people have been implemented in Seattle and Boston. JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 49 No. 2, Summer 2018, 252–269. DOI: 10.1111/josp.12233 V C 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.