Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic, despite a low poverty rate overall, has identified 16 areas at risk of social exclusion. Mostly located close to the city center and populated by 12-15 000 citizens, these areas are home to mainly Roma people – the major ethnical minority in Brno. Experts estimate that 78% of Roma children leave school early, compared with a regional average of 2.7%. To deal with this situation, Brno municipality welcomed the proposal of the URBACT network ONSTAGE transferring the good practice of L’Hospitalet, namely of the Municipal Music School and Arts Centre (EMMCA) , an education scheme that improves social inclusion through arts and music. Even before ONSTAGE, the municipality co-financed a music programme provided by local organisations and ran high-quality affordable music schools (ZUŠ) for children throughout the city, but children from socially challenged backgrounds were usually unattending.
Through ONSTAGE a wide variety of stakeholders, including representatives from the municipality and the region, all local non-profit organizations and schools situated in the target areas have been brought together to introduce the educational music program similar to EMMCA’s one in 10 target schools.
Brno’s pilot program began in September 2019 in the primary school ZŠ nám. 28. Října, extending the morning curricular programme with an extra music lesson for 5th to 9th grade classes. In parallel, another music program was started in a newly opened kindergarten, MŠ Sýpka, which entailed the setting up of a weekly group music course and the purchase of musical instruments.
At the end of November 2019, a free-of-tuition community choir ONSTAGE was established. In January 2020, another music program in the primary school ZŠ Merhautova (3x2h/week) was opened.
In the spring of 2020, all the programs were well established, but encountered a halt during lockdown. However, despite the slowing of activities due to Covid-19, group violin, cello and guitar lessons began in two primary schools — and in September 2020, 37 students signed up for guitar lessons, four times more than the year before. As a result, the project had a real impact on the understanding and use of music for social change.
Sustainable and integrated urban approach
One of the key points of the approach has been the establishment of the Urban Local Group (ULG), composed by a wide variety of stakeholders, including both institutional representatives (from the municipality and the region), local associations, and schools. This alliance has been fundamental in supporting the project throughout its duration and assuring the project’s sustainability after its official conclusion. The diversity of the ULG’s members also meant valuable insights into the specific problems of social exclusion and policies to counteract them from different perspectives.
Participatory approach
Participation has been one of the main objectives of the project since its early stages and there are now a lot of agents positively engaged.
By targeting schools with a high number of pupils from socially excluded segments of society, participation in the music programs has been fundamental in bringing together children from different backgrounds.
The choir represented an important tool for participation as well. It was the result of a cooperation with local non-profit organization IQ Roma Servis and it was free of tuition. At the basis of the project there was the belief that a broad repertoire – popular songs, gospels and traditional Roma songs – and no age restriction represented promising concepts for creating a community space where local people could meet and share the joy of making music together and get to know the richness of the Roma’s musical culture.
What difference has it made
The ON STAGE Transfer Network has made it possible in Brno to think of an innovative and more inclusive music education system through enhancing social cohesion.
Although state basic schools (ZUŠ) offer high quality music education, it is mainly designed to prepare students for the conservatory, which opens for them the opportunity to pursue a professional career in music. Teaching music to enhance social cohesion was a concept little known in the city and its potential had hardly been explored. Being part of the ON STAGE project gave Brno the chance to change this. Social cohesion has been enhanced and many children who did not attend musical classes before have then joined the new programs. For the second year of the programme (2020/2021) even more people signed to the courses and the choir.
Despite Covid-19 related restrictions, all the programs have been successful in establishing foundations with students and teachers who believe in the idea of the project and are willing to continue. In only a short period of time, the ON STAGE project has been meaningful for Brno and can actually make positive changes.
Transferring the practice
The ON STAGE Trasfernetwork was led by the city of L’Hospitalet and involved, apart from Brno, Aarhus (Denmark), Katowice (Poland), Adelfia (Italy), Valongo (Portugal) and Grigny (France).
The ON STAGE Transfer Network organized also a teachers’ mobility program. For Brno’s teachers, seeing L’Hospitalet’s group-based ‘El Sistema’ teaching method in practice was a real eye-opener — as were opportunities to exchange with partner cities such as Grigny (a suburb of Paris, France).
In Vilafranca, a city of 40 thousand residents, there are 951 (6,5 % of the stock) vacant apartments and five vacant residential buildings are listed. Ownership: 1% public authority, 74% Individual owners, and 25% commercial housing enterprises.
In the context of high poverty, exclusion and the increasing number of empty housing units, accentuated by the crisis, the city developed the “From empty housing to social inclusion” programme. The aim for this inclusion programme is the renovation and rehabilitation of vacant housing while reusing them for social purposes. In this programme the council does the construction work with public investment, and in return for the public investment, the owner transfers the use of the building to the council for a period of time proportional to the investment. When the constructions work finishes the Social Services select beneficiary families. This programme required 300.000 € per year in the city budget. So far, more than 250 houses have been renovated (appr. 10 flats per year) and offered on preferential lease to poor or homeless families, and 500 persons have gained professional skills through the training programmes. More renovation could be done if there would be more public money.
Vilafranca was very satisfied with its project which was considered a Good Practice by the Diputació de Barcelona first and then by URBACT in 2017 because it not only affected the recovery of empty housing but also improved the social level of the unemployed workers who participated in the rehabilitation, considering to close the circle. This practice, despite the good results obtained, proved to be insufficient when large homeowners got out of their properties in anticipation of future price increases. This abandonment of entire buildings has led to the disorganized and mafia occupation of housing throughout the country and also in Vilafranca.
Facing this new situation, and also due to financial limits (the city budget cannot afford big investments) the search for a more wholesale intervention has become more evident. This is why the city decided for the transfer of the Chemnitz good-practice case, aiming for connecting owners with private investors instead of making the renovation from public budget.
The Good Practice of Chemnitz has important advantages: a public project carried out by a private company, offering a flexible and proactive approach for the revitalisation of the historic housing stock of the city, and over time becoming the central collector and distributer of information on the buildings.
Solutions offered by the good practice
The specific objectives the city would like to achieve with transferring Chemnitz good-practice case are:
To connect owners with private investors as the city budget cannot afford big investments.
To connect and coordinate the different stakeholders for the reactivation of the vacant buildings in a right and efficient way.
Setting up a body/institution to support reactivation of vacant/derelict building/flats.
Contacting, activating and supporting owners.
Identifying, contacting and supporting potential buyers and investors
Connecting & coordinating public & private stakeholders
The challenge is how to achieve this funding without compromising the budget and municipal action, so that the collaboration between the administration (the ‘Housing Agency’, the Urban Planning Office and building Control Department) and the private initiative should be normal practice in a 21st century society.
To approach the problem from this perspective, it became necessary to expand the original social orientation and start looking for private partners with enough technical capacity and sufficient financial solvency. In this sense an agreement has been signed with Habitat3 (housing for social inclusion) foundation and 10 housing units have been recovered so far.
The Habitat3 Foundation is a social rental housing manager whose main objective is to search for and to obtain rental housing at prices below market prices. Habitat3 is a benchmark in Catalonia in the housing sector, being recognized in 2019 with the Gold World Habitat Awards by UN Habitat.
The relation between the City Council and HABITAT3 is a win-win relation: the City council searches the building and the tenants, and once a building has been found, HABITAT3 is contacted for its assessment. Usually HABITAT3 spends around 2 weeks to see the state of the building, the rehabilitation that should be carried out and the investment that would be necessary. Then HABITAT3 decides to invest part of their budget for social housing in Vilafranca. HABITAT3 isn’t paid for this collaboration.
Sustainable and integrated urban approach
The project helps to mitigate effects of urban processes that are unsustainable. By strengthening the inner city through the concentration and support of developments in the existing central neighbourhoods, the urban structures are valorised. This way, the reuse of historic housing stock helps to save resources instead of promoting suburban sprawl. Dense and mixed-use urban structures reduce distances and encourage alternative means of transport. What is more, the successful outcomes of the project help to preserve the intrinsic qualities of those quarters and help to overcome the negative image of neighbourhoods. The provision with moderately priced and appropriately equipped housing for families, elderly people or marginalised population groups strengthens social coherence and reduces the ground for conflicts of different sorts.
Participatory approach
The scope of the project is to activate owners, private and public stakeholders to save, restore and reanimate buildings. It can be described as a networking hub between persons, groups and authorities that have an interest in this goal. Starting and keeping communication going around the objects is the core of the project’s activities.
According to the experiences of Chemnitz, the agency is the only instance that connects the threads from all different sides:
• the relevant departments in the city government (e.g. urban planning, fund management, building control, preservation, finance and tax, public relations),
• the different owner constellations (private owners or ownership groups of different sizes and local/national /international backgrounds, public housing company, unappropriated),
• the potential investors and users (professional real estate developers, grass-roots housing initiatives),
• additional stakeholders in the neighbourhoods and civil society.
It was important to bring relevant stakeholders in the field of housing together through the ULG. Before, the housing commission was responsible for this issue. It consisted only of representatives from each political party. Based on the work of the ULG work has been done to convert the housing commission into a housing council in which not only political parties will participate, but also agents and entities of the housing sector (such as real estate agents or tenant unions).
What difference has it made
The Municipal Housing Agency has been relaunched, as a one-stop destination for all issues related to housing with the desire to provide comprehensive services and local housing policies: https://urbanisme.vilafranca.cat/oficina-local-dhabitatge It is located in an office in the city centre and will be the referent point to attend all matters concerning vacant buildings in Vilafranca.
The relaunching of the Municipal Housing Agency allows to improve the capacities
to identify buildings in need of refurbishment in the future and
to establish a steady collaboration framework for their refurbishment, beyond the micro work the City Council already does
to have a unique access point for citizens, where they can meet experts to help them solve their housing problem / find a solution.
After having the database updated, the agency will contact owners proactively and will connect them with investors, explaining the advantages to participate in the public program “From empty buildings to social housing” that deals with the renovation and rehabilitation of vacant housing while reusing them for social purposes. To achieve a better collaboration the town hall has created a round table about housing policies, bringing public and private stakeholders together.
VISION - Through the new housing agency and the grown cooperation among public and private stakeholders through the round table, the outcome will be a decrease the number of empty flats and buildings and there will be new spaces for social purposes like affordable rental flats. Expectations are: increase the number of rental flats in the city center, improve flats and buildings increasing their energy efficiency and reducing the CO2 footprint.
Transferring the practice
A strong demographic decline and thus numerous vacancies in the old neighbourhoods are typical for former industrial hubs and towns distant from the economic centres in their countries. The lack of communication between the public authorities, often unavailable or unable owners, and the very diverse group of potential investors and users, is a problem that is visible to different extents in almost any city.
The ALT/BAU Transfer Network focused on alternative strategies in central and historic districts of European cities to activate unused and decaying housing stock resulting from demographic, economic and social change. Based on the experiences from Chemnitz’ URBACT Good Practice “Housing Agency for Shrinking Cities” (Agentur StadtWohnen Chemnitz), the network transferred experiences that proved successful to proactively connect administrations, owners, investors and users to initiate sustainable and resource saving development.
Under the leadership of Chemnitz the following partner cities were involved in the ALT/BAU Transfer Network: Riga Latvia, Constanta Romania, Vilafranca del Penedes Spain, Turin Italy, Seraing Belgium, Rybnik Poland.
CO4CITIES is the UIA - URBACT Transfer Mechanism pilot network that transfers the methodological structure of UIA CO-CITY: the Regulation on collaboration between citizens' organizations and the Municipality in the co-management of urban commons; the Pact of collaboration, a legal tool providing for a change of attitude in the public/communities relationship; the essential role of Community Hubs in the process of community empowerment and in the path of building a new collaborative approach between the citizens and the public administration.
Collaborative Tools for Cities in Urban Regeneration
“I welcome in my restaurant voyagers, not tourists. People who are curious and respectful of the local lifestyle, who appreciate that the daily menu depends of the fresh and locally available products and who do some research before visiting”.
Fausto Cavanna, owner, La Taverna di Colombo, Genoa (Italy)
Ten cities have embarked on a new journey to work together on promoting a sustainable impact of tourism into integrated urban development in the URBACT Tourism-friendly cities Action Planning Network. Championing one of the world’s most hot topics, the city of Genoa (IT) has the challenging role of leading this new URBACT network that seeks to harmonize the realities experienced by residents, local authorities, tourism industry and tourists. The ten partners – Genoa (lead partner), Braga (PT), Caceres (ES), Druskininkai (LT), Dubrovnik Development Agency (HR), Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council (IE), Krakow (PL), Rovaniemi (FI), Utrecht (NL) and Venice (IT) – will explore innovative governance and action models to capture the social, environmental and economic dimensions of tourism.
Fausto Cavanna, the owner of the restaurant La Taverna di Colombo in Genoa (Italy) explaining to the Tourism-friendly cities network his aspirations for sustainable tourism.
Why tourism?
Tourism industry is one of the most important of our era. Tourism, travels and related sectors account for 10,3% of GDP in EU and 11,7% of total employment: at global level, Europe has been hit by the second biggest increase, with 671.1 million international arrivals last year (51% the number of international tourist arrivals at global level), an eight per cent increase year-on-year. A long-term study by the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) forecasts a growth in European tourism, to an estimated 744 million tourists (+1.8%), or 41.1% of the global market, over the period to 2030.
However, this economic outlook does not capture the complexity of the effects that the tourism production system imposes to city life. Rising housing prices, congestion, little regulation power over tech-enabled companies and platforms active at global level on sectors as hospitality and transport, are just some of the consequences that are currently changing neighbourhood life (and city finances) in urban areas all around Europe.
And while the devil is in the details, so is also the solution. Balancing the importance of tourism for local economies with temporary and permanent residents wellbeing, harmonizing present needs with future environmental concerns, adjusting the outdated instruments of local administrations with fast changing business models, requires collective answers and actions.
To do this, the network will employ the URBACT method, taking an integrated and participative approach to urban challenges with a focus on transnational exchange and learning. Peer exchange and co-learning on the network level will be translated into integrated action plans on the local level and contribute to capacity building of key local stakeholders.
The URBACT Tourism-friendly cities Network kick off meeting on 26 & 27 September 2019 in Genoa, Italy.
What exactly is a tourism-friendly city?
Was the question the lead partner Genoa debated with the prospective network partners when they were preparing the application for the last open call of URBACT’s Action Planning Networks. The answer is in the line that local community and tourists should work together for urban sustainability. The city is not something to be taken for granted, a service that somebody is entitled to for paying taxes or a visiting fee. It is a fragile ecosystem, where each stakeholder needs to become aware to the effects’ of each other actions. This is why, while the network is recognizing the key economic importance of tourism, but it is also exploring key questions of the kind of growth that each city aspires to. Rather than pointing a finger on the negative consequences of tourism, the network wants to make the industry and tourists part of the co-design of solutions, alongside residents and local authorities.
Meeting Fairbnb representatives on September 30th 2019 in Venice, as part of mapping effort of new stakeholders that propose alternative models supporting sustainable tourism.
A sense of urgency to act
One key takeaway from the network’s kick-off meeting in Genoa on 26 & 27 September 2019 was the urgency experienced by each city partner to find a way forward to steward sustainable tourism development at local level. There was also a common aspiration that this current URBACT project could serve as the beginning of a new way of working together at local level, perhaps with the URBACT Local Groups (ULG) becoming a local observatory for monitoring progress on the future actions plans and global practices.
The first step in this process was to analyse what each partner city defined as its most pressing challenge related to sustainable tourism. During the kick-off meeting, the partners used a pitching arena designed for the event to start reflecting on existing implementations plans, lessons learned, aspirations, political commitment and available local resources related to their local realities. All these elements will be explored in more detail during the partner visits over the coming five months.
We are looking forward to our journey ahead! You can keep up with our network’s and URBACT’s work on sustainable tourism by following the hashtags #sustainabletourism and #tfcities and by subscribing to URBACT’s newsletter.
Making culture accessible to everyone, and everyone part of culture
Amsterdam is a world city for culture, but a lot of stories in our city are still untold, unrecognized or undervalued. Access to culture is not always assured for everyone. The city of Amsterdam wants to broaden and diversify arts and culture in the city. Read more here!
The ACCESS Action Planning Network believes that a more inclusive culture has the ability to facilitate greater understanding of individuals and their lives, increase empathy towards others and develop an appreciation of the diversity of human experience and cultures. Culture plays an important role in finding solutions to the complex issues of today's urban metropolises. Eight European capital cities collaborate on inclusive cultural policies to open up culture to all citizens. The aim is to bring about a real shift in cultural policymaking and as a result ensure access to culture for all citizens.
When its beta version was tested as part of an URBACT project in 2017, few could have predicted how popular the Světlo Valmez light festival would become. In just two years this gathering for the local community has grown into a major international event, says Jamie Mackay.
Valašské Meziříčí (CZ), known colloquially by residents as Valmez, is a small town of 22,000 inhabitants in the south east of Czechia. Well-known as a centre for chemical production and manufacturing, as well as its strong retail sector, Valmez is home to a vibrant community that prides itself on balancing modern ambitions with a strong sense of tradition.
Back in 2015 the town took part in URBACT’s CityCentreDoctor network, the aim of which was to help local governments make better use of their CBDs, protecting them amongst other things from competition from out of town shopping centres. As part of the network, the local council invested in new public services, improved parking facilities, cleaned-up the riverbanks and beautified the old town with trees and green spaces.
The greatest success, though, was a new-fangled events programme which has so-far included everything from a farmer’s market to a beach volleyball tournament.
“URBACT helped us to organise, but it also opened our minds to new ideas” confirms Václav Valčík, a project manager at the municipality. Of all the actions, though, the Světlo Valmez light festival is undeniably that which has most vindicated the town hall’s collaborative approach.
The idea itself was the brainchild of a local entrepreneur called Pavel Röder. “I used to work in 3D graphics back in the day. I had a creative studio and I always wanted to do video mapping in this town which I feel quite patriotic towards,” Mr. Röder tells me, “I noticed that light festivals were working really well around the world in big cities, I’ve seen them in New York, Montreal and Singapore for example. So I thought why not try to do the same in a Valmez, where people are so kind-hearted?”
A small-scale global event
The first edition of the light festival ran in September 2017 with a total budget of EUR 40,000, half of which was provided by the municipality and the rest by local sponsors. The activities were small-scale at first, mainly focused on video projections onto historical buildings, accompanied by musical performances. What the organisers wanted to emphasise, though, was interactivity. “There are lots of festivals around and about, and most of the time they don’t offer much in the way of participation,” says Mr Röder, “It’s just one directional, you come and you watch some bands and then you go. We wanted people to be able to create things, to make and play with images.”
One of the more ambitious experiments was targeted at the local kindergarten. Ahead of the first festival, the organising team invited local kids to draw pictures that were to be incorporated into one of the exhibitions. In total the team collected 1,700 drawings that were then projected onto an old building in the town centre, transforming it into a 4-year old’s fantasy castle. “It gave me real energy to see how these kids responded,” says Röder, “they were so amazed to see their designs up there like that”. The initiative also helped bolster numbers. Thanks in part to the attendance of the children’s friends and family, the festival easily broke its target and attracted over 7,000 people.
This in itself was an impressive enough feat for such a small community. The scale of expansion, though, was to prove even more inspiring. For the September 2018 edition, Mr Röder and his team raised the bar once again. Despite the fact that funding from the municipality was reduced to 30% this time around, the reputation of the event enabled the organisers to gather resources from a more diverse range of sources. The Zlín region and the Visegrad Foundation, for example, were both sufficiently impressed by the first edition that they provided grants to support the project. Mr Röder’s team were also able to broaden their sponsorship base, and successfully gathered larger individual investments ranging between EUR 1,500 and EUR 3,000.
Naturally this had a knock-on effect on the range of activities. In 2018, a seven-minute light show was projected onto the walls of the Žerotín Castle while the town’s iconic Granary Chapel was home to an interactive laser show which saw light beams responding, through algorithms, to live music. Between sessions participants were even given the opportunity to explore new virtual and augmented reality technologies. “The first year was mostly confined to the town centre. We had eleven installations and concerts were for free in the main square. The next year we expanded into larger area in the suburbs too and had over fifteen exhibition spaces. Around 25,000 people came in that one night alone,” explains Mr Röder.
Thanks to this enormous, unexpected turnout, the organisers were awarded a third-place prize in the ‘low budget, non-profit’ category of the prestigious EuBea – European Best Event Awards 2018. Judges from around the globe described Valmez as “ranking alongside the world’s metropolises such as Berlin, Paris or New York with this city-style event”.
Mr Röder’s dream of a small-scale global festival, of the highest, cutting edge standard, appeared to have come true.
The cost of success
Fame, though, was to bring its own challenges. In fact, popularity has turned out to be a double-edged sword for the festival’s funding model. Now that the event has been deemed a commercial success, public money accounts for just 15% of the budget. Mr Röder and his team are therefore turning to new methods to cover the increasing costs. The tickets now come with a symbolic fee and the organisers are also increasingly reaching out to local businesses to offer free services such as transportation rather than just monetary contributions.
While the financial strategy is in flux, the festival’s reputation continues to grow and, by all accounts, has further scope to do so. For the latest 2019 edition, the organisers decided to extend the festival to cover two full days while the line-up was filled with higher profile individuals. Renowned Boston (USA) based programmers and artists, Andrew and Alyssa Ringler, were invited to show-off their expertise in interactive design. Their works were displayed on one of the town’s apartment blocks. Tata Bojs, one of Czechia’s most important pop-rock groups, also featured on the bill, as did original installations created by one of the band members, Milan Cais.
The Světlo Valmez light festival is no longer just an event. Since its inception within the URBACT framework it has grown to transform the face of the town itself. “Thanks to the high participation of people from across Czech Republic and also people from abroad we’ve seen an increase in tourism over the past three years,” says Mr Valčík, “suddenly, our city has become known across Europe”.
The University of Prague (CZ) is still working on a full analysis of the economic consequences for the region as a whole. What is certain, though, is that with as many as 40,000 people attending the most recent edition, and an expanded number of installations, Světlo Valmez has come from nowhere to become the largest, and most important, light festival in the Czech Republic.
As the organisers prepare for the future spirits are high. Mr Röder, in particular, is full of optimism, “All of us at the creative team but also the organisational team have had a lot of fun and the festival has also been really well received by the public” he tells me, “We want to aim big. I mean look at Burning Man, that’s also in the middle of nowhere, in the desert. That’s pretty inspirational. Who knows if this festival will happen in Valmez in the future, or in a larger area. Whatever happens, though, we definitely want to carry on.”
The joint policy challenge of the Come in! Transfer network partner cities is to mobilise citizens, foster civilian power and urban stewardship through raising awareness towards the values of built heritage to decrease social isolation. This also highlights the brokerage role of municipalities (reating conditions for stakeholders to creatively shape urban environment and public policies).
Transfer the work of Manchester Arts Sustainability Team (MAST) to support cities to mobilise their arts and culture sectors to contribute towards local climate change action is the aim of the C-CHANGE network. This can be done by: 1) Developing local policies, governance and capacity to act 2) Developing plans to reduce CO2 emissions and/or adapt to climate change, and supporting implementation 3) Developing plans to use arts and culture to engage citizens to act, and supporting implementation 4) Encouraging replication in other cities.
Fabio Sgaragli, URBACT Lead Expert at Fondazione G. Brodolini says communities can and should play a key role in cities’ creativity and takes a look at pioneering cities like Glasgow, Bilbao and Turin.
Cities can stimulate economic growth and improve the quality of life for their citizens by implementing public policies aimed at creating local ecosystems that sustain creativity and innovation. In this respect, policymakers have invested relevant resources in the so-called creative (or culture) – led policies – i.e. public policies aimed at sustaining the creation of territorialized production complexes based on creative activities. This is the case of many European cities like, for instance, Glasgow (UK), Manchester (UK), Bilbao (ES), or Turin (IT), which have implemented effective creative-led policies that contributed to renewing their image and attractiveness limiting the negative consequences of a decline in the city’s industrial activities.
Creative-led policies could be clustered along a continuum where, on the one side, we have a ‘top-down’ approach (which comprehends projects “developed as part of a conscious top-down planning strategy”) and, on the other hand a ‘bottom-up’ plan, which comprehends projects developed by spontaneous, creative communities. According to existant practice, this latter approach seems to be more effective, since it favours the development of a ‘collaborative atmosphere’, encouraging the spontaneous development of artistic and entrepreneurial activities. Very often, “bottom up” approaches are grounded in “third spaces”, i.e. new type of urban spaces that sometimes are the result of urban regenerations and that have the potential to be transformed into hubs of entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation and new lifestyles, as well as social and cultural integration. These reap the benefits offered by, for instance, emerging creative sectors, digital technologies, the sharing and 'maker' economy, artists and cultural practitioners, and social innovation.
This breakout session has explored this topics from an open innovation angle, reflecting on the role that creatives, artists and cultural institutions and organisations can play in improving cities, and how local administrations can best engage with these creative communities and support their work. The session has presented concrete case histories and methodologies on how local administrations can perform this role.
Creative cities
Milan (IT) is a very good example on how a city can facilitate the emergence of creative communities of actors through social innovation processes, designing urban regeneration strategies that take into account the role of locally-based, spontaneous coalitions of “unusual” actors. The city can already count on many existing cultural mainstream assets (like for instance Fashion Week or Design Week), but has managed in the last few years to engage a variety of new, actors, encouraging bottom up innovations through a mix of policy tools: financial support, regeneration of unused public buildings, stakeholders’ consultations, contamination labs, etc. The city’s administration has been particularly good at attracting private investments in the regeneration of unused public buildings, converting them into hubs for collaboration and innovation, in many different areas of work (from social entrepreneurship to urban food, passing through culture and creativity). This approach has proven successful, as those new types of hubs aggregate creative communities and accelerate their work. Two good examples for social innovation hubs include MareMilano and Fabriq.
Lisbon (PT) is enacting the concept of creative bureaucracy by supporting the creation of new enterprises in the cultural and creative industries through a mix of intermediary and support actions. As a support set of actions, the city administration has managed over the years to build an entire supply chain, creating its own incubators and accelerators, labs with a variety of machineries all available for use by young creatives (artists, craftsmen). As a set of support actions, the city enacts the role of intermediary by assisting young creatives in going to market through both online and offline marketplaces and by facilitating the matches between young talents from Lisbon with international opportunities in other innovative contexts.
Cluj – Napoca (RO) has invested heavily in the development of cultural and creative industries. Indeed, the municipal budget for cultural, youth & social projects rose tenfold over the past years. Funding from the municipality has been oriented to subsidise the independent cultural & youth sector (local NGOs) and sometimes to finance specific projects of major cultural institutions in the city. Besides the direct investment allocated to the cultural operators and institutions, in the past 5 years the City Hall invested almost EUR 40 million into developing the cultural and touristic capacity of Cluj-Napoca. Other creative industries (besides IT), like film, design, media and music have had a few rising star projects in recent years. These are potential key advantages and assets for the city that need solid and long-term support to flourish. Beside this, the City also provides a good example of how to leverage culture and creativity for social inclusion and citizens’ empowerment and wellbeing, through the involvement of stakeholders in neighbourhood- based experiments, where arts and creativity are used as tools to involve citizens of all ages in the improvement of public spaces.
Below are some conclusions from the breakout session.
Culture should be understood in its diversity
There are many forms and layers of “culture” in a city: from the values belonging to the mainstream community of citizens, to the new emerging clusters of creative initiatives driven by informal groups working at the periphery of mainstream culture (from the variety of artistic expressions taking life in different places around a city to the work performed by new type of intermediaries bridging the gap between art and craftsmanship). Cities cannot apply a “one size fits all” approach, but need to take into account this diversity in the design of their policies. In this sense, URBACT Local Support groups can help bring together different stakeholders representing the diversity of cultures in the city to co-design urban policies that favour differentiation and integration, rather than homologation and monopolies.
Culture boosts innovation
Culture represents an intangible asset for the city, and can be leveraged to create drivers for innovation and new entrepreneurship. For instance, cities can use their cultural assets (such as historical centres) to foster the connection between culture, creativity and tourism, therefore creating a positive cycle of economic development by attracting external resources.
Culture engages citizens
Lastly, culture and arts are very good tools to engage citizens and should therefore be made more accessible. It’s very important to create new types of spaces for collaboration, such as social innovation centres focussed on cultural and creative industries, that can be placed in former abandoned landmark buildings in historical centres. Those new type of spaces, usually governed by public-private partnerships, can be seen as platforms for the match between demand and supply of innovations in the cultural and creative sectors. By creating opportunities for bringing together talent, technologies and creatives, hubs can spark and support the emergence of new projects and ventures, and attract investment to sustain them, resulting in job creation, economic growth, urban regeneration, and new forms of cultural heritage preservation as well as improve citizens’ wellbeing, which means local sustainable urban development.
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.
Urban poverty is a complex phenomenon. This article aims to highlight some interesting aspects of the problem of poverty and some – partly unexpected – experiences of anti-poverty policies. Also the long history of URBACT to deal with the issue of urban poverty will be summarized, following the earlier URBACT projects with important milestones of capitalization efforts since 2012 up till today.
Most statements of the article are based on common research with Laura Colini (Colini-Tosics, 2017).
Urban poverty: complex topic, no easy solutions
The analysis of poverty data over time and across territories brings up many interesting and surprising results. Data show ups and downs in the success to fight poverty: the share of severely materially deprived population in the EU-27 countries decreased between 2005 and 2009 from 11% to 8%, but got back to 11% in 2012. The effects of the financial crisis were especially strong in Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia and Italy, where deprivation rates increased by 7-8 % between 2008 and 2012 (European Commission, 2014).
There is no direct correlation between poverty rates and the level of inequalities: in times of economic growth poverty may decline parallel to an increase in inequalities, while since the crisis both poverty and inequalities are increasing.
The spatial patterns of poverty are very different across European countries: in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary deprivation rates are much lower in cities than in rural areas, while in Austria, Ireland, UK and Belgium the situation is just the reverse, deprivation rates are higher in cities than in the rest of the country. On the other hand, the territorial concentration of urban poverty seems to increase everywhere: according to new survey results metropolitan Europe is becoming more divided, with increasing income disparities accompanying growing spatial separation of the better-off from the poor (Musterd et al, 2017).
The drafting of the Europe 2020 strategy started before the crisis. One of the five headline targets is inclusive growth with the aim to reduce in the EU the number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion by 20 million, relative to 2010. However, between 2008 and 2012 this number increased by 6.5 million. As a consequence, the poverty target of the EU2020 strategy will not be fulfilled: instead of decreasing to below 20% this share raised to almost a quarter (24.8%) of the total population.
Poverty neighbourhoods and questionable interventions
The most visible forms of urban poverty are those which are territorially concentrated, to inner city, housing estate or peripheral areas.
The photos illustrate these different spatial configurations of poverty neighbourhoods on the examples taken from Budapest, Kosice and Sofia. Regardless on their spatial position, such areas are called „ghettoes” by politicians and become targets of physical interventions. However, it is easy to commit mistakes. Even interventions with the best intentions, if not paying enough attention to understand the reasons and processes of deprivation and poverty, might miss the target. The following cases are examples on contradictory interventions into deprived areas.
A) Eliminating transitory areas (diminishing very much needed cheap housing stock)
It is very important to understand the roles that different neighbourhoods play in the local housing markets. Some poor areas perform the role of being a transitory neighbourhood in which newcomers to a city can find affordable rents and low costs of living. Once personal conditions improve they move out of the area. These areas have to be distinguished from the ‘dead-end’ areas from where the chances are very low to move out anywhere. Thus a static view on a neighbourhood (its composition in a given moment of time) does not tell about its real, dynamic role in the city.
Correspondingly, making a decision to demolish an area just on the basis of its low social status can have disastrous consequences on the functioning of the local housing market.
As an illustration an inner city neighbourhood of a Dutch city can be shown. This is a relatively poor area with housing association owned social housing stock. As the city leadership wanted to attract back middle and high income residents from the suburbs, politicians raised the idea to demolish the area, replacing the “outdated” stock with high quality new housing. This would have obviously a disastrous effect, diminishing the chances of those population groups which use this cheap area as an entry point into the local housing market. No wonder that big struggles have started between the tenants (the housing association) and the city leadership. The plans have later been modified – partly due to the financial crisis – towards giving higher role for renovation.
B) Demolishing good quality housing to tackle serious social problems
In the case of dead-end neighbourhoods, demolition of social housing might be unavoidable. However, there can always questions be raised if the demolition of physically fit buildings remains the only answer on the high concentration of economic and social problems. In most cases demolitions could have been avoided by changing in time housing allocation policies
with efforts to create more mixed neighbourhoods in the same area, avoiding demolition.
The building in the photo was part of a housing estate in one of the large French cities. In the last decade big physical redevelopment activities have started in France, with thousands of flats demolished (including the building shown). The aim was to decrease the high share of social housing while also tackling the problems of high criminality, unemployment and poverty in the area. However, as over 40 thousand families are waiting for social housing in the conurbation of this city, large political debates broke out about the demolition of (otherwise physically fit) high-rise buildings. The decision of the local municipality to demolish was largely influenced by the fact that extra subsidies given by the French state for demolition made this option economically viable in the calculations against the more difficult complex, integrated regeneration interventions.
C) Renovated building not wanted by the original residents
Physical interventions have to be in harmony with social and financial considerations. This is especially true for the renovation/regeneration of existing buildings: the level of renovation and the financial conditions influence fundamentally the living conditions of the residents. For the extreme form of using renovation intentionally to change social conditions a new word has been coined: “renoviction” refers to the strategy of a landlord to evict all of a building's tenants on the grounds that a large-scale renovation is planned.
In one of the very poor areas in a Hungarian city a different example of surprising and unintended consequences of renovation occurred.
The local government first wanted to demolish a dilapidated building with 40 single room flats (no water, no toilet and no bathroom within the flats) but then changed the approach towards renovation. The tenants were placed temporarily to other buildings and all the 40 units were renovated, also introducing the water into the flats, creating the opportunity to have inside toilet and a small shower. To the greatest surprise of the local government most of the tenants rejected to move back into the improved flats. The reason is quite simple: in the absence of a universal housing benefit system the poor tenants were unable to cover the increase of the housing costs, due to the new payment item of running water in their flats.
The first URBACT effort to conceptualize urban poverty and potential interventions
URBACT has launched a capitalisation project in 2012 (Colini-Tosics, 2013) to explore in more details the problems of urban poverty and the ways to handle these. One of the main lessons learnt was that not all segregated areas can be considered as problematic. The concentration of poor people in a particular neighbourhood is not a problem in itself, there is no ‘tipping point’ which identifies harmful segregation. “Segregation might become problematic if it is a result of no choice and leads towards neighbourhoods which have no economic opportunities, only weak institutions: bad schools, no employment, dirty streets, lot of criminality, bad housing, bad connectivity.” (These are the words of late Professor Ronald van Kempen, Utrecht, in the video Against Divided Cities – Colini et al, 2012.)
Another lesson is that interventions into deprived areas have to be carefully thought of. There are many types of possible interventions into segregated areas, demolition is not at all the only possible approach. “If nothing else is done, as the moving out of people and knocking down of the buildings, it is quite likely that the dead-end neighbourhood will be replicated somewhere else. If the reasons why a particular place became a dead-end space are not fundamentally changed, then the structural forces will create another one. The notion that you can eliminate a problem by bulldozing the place, is naïve and creates great human costs.” (These are the words of Professor Georg Galster of Wayne university in the video Against Divided Cities – Colini et al, 2012).
As the briefly mentioned examples have shown and the experts have highlighted, it is a big dilemma of urban poverty policies to what extent to invest into poor people or into poor places and what type of interventions to chose.
All the three examples shown for contradictory interventions belong to the second option, area-based policies, which focus on specific geographical units, poor neighbourhoods. The aim of such policies is to improve the situation of people living in these areas, assuming that by focusing on places with specific problems, the situation of many of the poor people will be improved. There is a large choice of interventions possible in poor areas.
‘Hard’ measures: physical restructuring/demolition or upgrading programmes in the poor areas (e.g. regeneration/renovation of housing, improving infrastructure, etc.)
‘Social mix strategies’: changing the social composition of deprived areas with high levels of socio-spatial segregation through bringing better-off residents (forced gentrification) and/or swap disadvantaged people into well-off areas (statutory quotas, etc.)
‘Soft’ measures: fostering skills, social capital and capacity of people living in poor areas (e.g. organization of training and job matching programmes, local festivals, etc.)
The alternative approach is called “people-based policies” in which interventions are not linked to any specific spatial level, do not affect directly the deprived areas but might have positive effect on them through improving the situation of poor peopleindependently from the fact where they live. Such policies are operated by domain/sector, e.g. social housing policy aiming to make affordable housing available to those in need, education and school policy promoting equal quality of education for all pupils, social policies aiming to increase the lowest levels of public services provision,
mobility policy guaranteeing equal opportunities of access by public transport from all parts of the city to the job market and major facilities, etc.
The 2013 URBACT work (Colini, et al, 2013) concluded that neither sectoral nor area-based approaches alone are satisfactory. A sectoral policy will only reach some of the factors, while an area-based initiative will only impact on the factors within the area, not at a city-wide or regional level. There is a tendency to consider area-based policies as more important as these are cost-effective and can facilitate the implementation of integrated policies, where a range of policies from different domains are applied simultaneously and in a coordinated way. The downside of this approach, however, is that disadvantaged people who do not live in the targeted areas are neglected. In addition, these policies may result in the displacement of some residents who become priced-out of the area due to rising house prices as a consequence of the intervention. Also a sucking effect may develop on people in need: beneficiaries of specific programmes tend to leave the most deprived area and are replaced by even poorer people coming from other part of the city (or even other cities) to the area because of the social services provided.
Efforts to explore the role of national poverty policies
Successful poverty policies, through sectoral interventions, the regeneration of deprived areas, or in combination of both, are difficult and complex processes. In order to find the optimal balance between sectoral and area-based interventions, policy integration is needed bringing policies from different governmental levels (vertical policy integration) and from different departments of government (horizontal policy integration) together. It is also important to deal with the territorial integration aspect, to handle the ‘waterbed’ phenomenon, whereby problems shift from the intervention area to other parts of the city. In this process national level poverty policies (initiating and supporting local strategies) are of crucial importance. It is clear, however, that there are big differences between EU countries: some have national urban poverty (and urban regeneration) policies, others not.
With regard to the growing threats of urban poverty and its spatial concentration,
URBACT launched an initiative to explore the existing national policies and practices of integrated regeneration of deprived areas. The outcome of this initiative was a seminar in Brussels in spring 2015 and a publication summarizing the national policies towards integrated regeneration of deprived areas (Tosics, 2015).
The conclusion of this seminar states that although the approaches of the EU countries are very different, it is an important sign that the two largest EU countries, Germany and France have recently introduced new policies towards deprived areas, with substantial increase of the financial support to regeneration interventions. The representative of the European Commission expressed his hope that the new Cohesion Policy approach will lead to increasing investments into urban strategies. The Commission aimed also to give a new impetus to the EU Urban Agenda.
URBACT contribution to the EU Urban Agenda and testing the Local Pact idea
The briefly listed past activities established the active contribution of URBACT to the Urban Poverty Partnership within the framework of the Urban Agenda for Europe. As a contribution to this work, the scoping paper prepared by URBACT experts Laura Colini and Ivan Tosics (2017, unpublished) was an important step towards determining the Action Plan of the partnership (UPP, 2018)
Action 7 of this Action Plan, titled “Cohesion policy post 2020: Local pact for the regeneration of urban deprived areas and neighbourhoods (UDAN)” proposes the Local Pact as a multi-fund instrument to assign urban authorities a leading role in the design of their strategies of urban regeneration of deprived urban areas in the Cohesion Policy post 2020. Based on a multi-level approach between local and national policymakers, it adopts a mixed place-based and people-based vision, allowing it to adopt the necessary flexibility to address the different dimensions of urban poverty through integrated strategies.
To test the parameters of a local pact, URBACT initiated in 2018 a further capitalisation project called “Fighting Urban Deprivation: A Local Pact”. The aim, to reduce territorial disparities and fight urban deprivation, should be achieved with a focus on deprived areas, while the actions can be territorially more spread, as many problems can be handled with interventions outside the deprived areas.
Within this ongoing capitalisation project a working group made up of voluntary members of the Urban Poverty Partnership (four member states: France, Germany, Poland and Spain and four URBACT cities: Lille, Berlin, Lodz and Barcelona), accompanied by URBACT experts, test the multi-level governance model for the reduction of urban disparities. Besides the cities, their Managing Authorities, regional and national level authorities also participate in order to make the guidelines more precise and test multi-level governance considerations.
The activity is organised through a series of national policy labs held in the different participating countries, gathering all relevant stakeholders. As a final product each country group of national-region-city level participants will produce a pilot integrated city “pact” between the city, the regional and the national level.
Those who are interested in this ongoing capitalisation project can get a snapshot of it during the URBACT City Festival in Lisbon, on Day 2 (14 September) in walkshop 5: Tackling urban poverty from the ground up.
