Are Urban Gardens the place for modern community hubs?

From Rome (IT) to Vilnius (LT) and A coruna (ES), Urban Gardening plays a key role in creating social links and is at the forefront of social innovation.

Urban Gardening is a now widespread concept. That is how Wikipedia proposes to define it: "Urban gardening is the practice of cultivating, processing and distributing food in or around a town, or city. The concepts in Urban Gardens and the associated facilities have received significant attention and popularity in the last 10 years and are growing to meet the needs of the ever-developing urban life."

But what happens in real life in European cities and towns? How can one build and manage urban gardens? Are Urban Gardens just about gardening in public or private plots, or are they creating something else, that one could call real community hubs?

While you were designing your city logo, they built an entire city from scratch

Adrian Docea gives cities a long overdue wake up call, suggesting they take a leaf out of the private sector to build their brands before it’s too late.

He says: ‘We’re completely out of time. Europe needs to speed up or we will lose the global battle for attracting investors, tourists, students, ‘startupers’ and the best engineers, inventors and creative minds out there. We’re too slow, too conservative, way too relaxed about our future. Meanwhile the whole world is changing.’

Naples’ Urban Civic Communities

By Nicola Masella

Conferring a greater social value to the historical municipal assets by promoting open and inclusive management schemes

BLUACT: Why the Blue Economy is an increasing sea of opportunity

A report by Darinka Czischke, Conor Moloney and Catalina Turcu

INT-HERIT Road towards an Operational Implementation Plan

A compendium of two videos released in the past weeks about the last transnational meetings by INT-HERIT.

Why is Lisbon’s community economic development approach so important in Europe today?

Bairros (Neighbourhoods) and areas of priority interventions BIP/ZIP.

WORKING SESSION OF ULG BARCELONA: EXPLORING CONNECTIONS AMONG ACTIONS.

By Sebastià Riutort (Barcelona, Lead Partner of the URBinclusion network). Integrated approach is one of the URBACT challenges of Implementation Networks (IN). The Guidelines that deal with this issue suggest some tools or methodologies that have the intention to get IN-members think about integration. Within the ULG of Barcelona we discussed about the synergies and interactions of the 7 actions which are part of the Implementation Plan.

The dilemma of fighting urban poverty: invest into poor people or into poor places?

This article provides an insight into URBACT’s work on urban poverty and its contribution to the Urban Poverty Partnership of the Urban Agenda for the European Union. At URBACT City Festival 2018, the walkshop 5 “Tackling urban poverty from the ground up” on 14 September will deal with these issues. 

Housing at the URBACT City Festival 2018: from the EU Urban Agenda to Lisbon (PT)

Affordable and adequate housing is one of the theme Lab sessions at URBACT City Festival taking place in Lisbon, 13-14 September 2018. This text serves the purpose of introducing to the housing debates in Lisbon, linking them to the work of the EU urban agenda (EU UA) on affordable housing.

 

Social media to strengthen local commerce: The case of the Semaest in Paris

Foram aprovadas, pelo Comité de Monitorização URBACT, 23 Redes de Planeamento de Ação, as quais envolvem 26 países e 203 parceiros. A decisão teve lugar no dia 25 de junho de 2019, na reunião realizada em Alba Iulia. Com a aprovação destas redes, concluem-se os procedimentos concursais no âmbito do URBACT III.