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BEE PATH good practice logic is very simple - bees are the best indicator of healthy environment! BeePathNet-Expanded project will widen the network of “bee-friendly cities” based on BeePathNet project transfer success. It will address urban environmental, biodiversity and food self-sufficiency challenges linked to urban beekeeping through integrated and participative approaches, build key stakeholders’ capacities to influence relevant policies, develop and implement efficient solutions.
BEE PATH Good Practice logic is very simple - bees are the best indicator of healthy environment! BeePathNet Transfer network aims to up-grade and transfer BEE PATH concept, solutions and results from Ljubljana to 5 other EU Cities. It will address urban environmental, biodiversity and food self
Following the success of the first generation of the Urbact BluAct Transfer Network - in which 6 European cities were supported to transfer a Good Practice in Blue Growth Entrepreneurship from the city of Piraeus between 2018 and 2020 - a further 4 cities have now also been given the opportunity to learn from the Piraeus Good Practice. The new partners in the BluAct Network will benefit from the rich experience of the city of Piraeus and will work alongside a nominated lead expert who led the original Transfer Network. With much of the hard work already done to break down the Good Practice into understandable blocks, it should be easier second time around to apply the URBACT transfer method.
BluAct is a Transfer network of 7 European port cities including Piraeus, Mataro, Ostend, Galati, Matosinhos, Burgas and Salerno aiming to share good practices in Blue Economy entrepreneurship. The project follows the success of Piraeus’ Blue Growth Initiative, an entrepreneurship competition that
Medium-sized post-industrial cities in Europe seek ways to grow & diversify their economies to compete with the pull of larger hubs. This is even more important in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Barnsley has been committed to growing higher value jobs, particularly within its tech and digital sectors. The Good Practice comprises 2 main pillars: - Enterprising Barnsley, an award-winning business support programme - The Digital Media Centre, a landmark hub for tech business in the town centre which has recently expanded into a second building as Barnsley expands The Seam - Barnsley's Digital Campus.
Working together to maximise the job creation potential of digital
TechRevolution, an URBACT Transfer Network, provides an opportunity for six cities from across the EU to get under the skin of an URBACT Good Practice developed and delivered in Barnsley UK which centres around two main pillars (below) as well as some spin-off activities. • Enterprising Barnsley - a
RU:RBAN's Good Practice is the Management model of Urban gardens in Rome to be transferred to newcomer cities that are geographically, historically and socio-culturally distant from each other, to ensure sharing of experiences to enhance the capacities of local governance. Transfer efforts will be ensured on the 3 well known and successful components the GP is divided into: 1. Capacity building, 2. Inspiring and training people to manage urban gardens (Gardenisers), 3. Governance & Regulations
This Transfer network builds upon the "Management model of Urban gardens in Rome" Good Practice, in order to transfer to EU cities geographically distant from each other to ensure sharing of experiences to enhance the capacities of local governance. Transfer efforts will be given to 3 distinct
Koszalin is a city in northwest Poland located 12 km south of the Baltic Sea coast. The three most important sectors of the economy are industry, construction and tourism.
Koszalin had already worked with Preston (UK) as a partner in the 2015-2018 URBACT network ‘Procure’, in which it had sought to understand if and how procurement could really be used to create jobs, support SMEs, and address environmental challenges - and whether procurement bureaucracy could really be reduced.
As a result, the city already had a local Integrated Action Plan (IAP) to improve its approaches to procurement and was convinced of the power of procurement to prompt both local economic change and pursue sustainability objectives.
In 2018, Koszalin was looking for help to implement their ambitious new IAP, and particularly objectives around understanding more effectively their procurement spending, encouraging local SMEs to bid for procurement opportunities with Koszalin City Council, including social and environmental considerations in decision-making; and influencing the procurement behaviour of other anchor institutions”.
Sustainable and integrated urban approach
The approach developed by Preston for procurement addressed local (economic), social and environmental considerations, while seeking to promote local products, social enterprises, local SMEs and environmentally friendly products. At the same time integration is key within municipalities and in the cites to ensure that these criteria are correctly identified and addressed.
Participatory approach
Through their URBACT Local Group (ULG), Koszalin City Council transferred the spend analysis tool to anchor institutions within the city, such as the Regional Hospital, Technical University of Koszalin, and Koszalin District Administration. This enabled them to explore alongside the city authorities how much they spend, and where that money goes geographically, sectorally and in business type terms.
What difference has it made
Across all procurers within the city, they collectively identified an annual spend of over EUR 100 million making procurement a significant contributor to Gross Domestic Product. The City Council was pleasantly surprised by the extent to which procurement spend was already spent with organisations in the Koszalin Functional Urban Area (83%) and SMEs (91%).
Addressing the other side of the procurement dynamic, Koszalin strengthened relations with business representative bodies and SMEs. They surveyed business chambers to identify challenges and how they could be addressed to support SME participation in procurement.
Transferring the practice
The city adopted Preston’s spend analysis tool and achieved the core objective of their previous URBACT network and IAP: to understand the scale of procurement spend in the city and to use this evidence to shape wider procurement practice.
Koszalin has presented their procurement activities and results at events organised by the Polish National URBACT Point to showcase their example as a city that has realised real incremental change. They also shared their learning bilaterally with the Gdansk-Gdynia-Sopot Metropolitan Area and they feature as a case study in URBACT’s strategic procurement training programme.
The involvement in Procure and Making Spend Matter has been “incredibly beneficial” for procurement in Koszalin and the city representatives are convinced that this is only the beginning of a new journey around procurement. Indeed, they recognise that progressive procurement is integral to the future economic, social and environmental destiny of Koszalin.
Capacity building and URBACT Method: updates from the Paris meeting
The first meeting in person after 2 years of pandemic has been a very powerful tool to empower URBACT Transfer Mechanism pilots. Next Agri partners met in Paris at the URBACT capacity building meeting with the aim of exchanging experiences and estate of the art of the project
The NEXT AGRI UIA - URBACT Transfer Mechanism pilot network builds from the experience of Milan. The city decided to set up an urban coalition with a series of partners to scale up this positioning in the peri-urban agricultural industry, setting up a stable growth and creating new jobs and skills. The project is mainly an urban policy experimentation that follows the place-based approach, focusing on new skills for new jobs in peri-urban agriculture. The project area can be defined as an “urban fringe”, representing the transition zone between the consolidated part of the city and the agricultural lands.This project aims at transfer to other 3 cities the processes and strategies implemented to create a favourable environment to develop new opportunities in the food system transformation in the urban and per urban agriculture sector.
Innovative approaches in periurban agriculture territories
Larger capital projects in poor neighbourhoods often do not lead to an improvement in the socio-economic situation of the local population. The USE-IT UIA - URBACT Transfer Mechanism pilot network shares a tested approach that directly links the realisation of larger capital projects - here construction of a new hospital - with the improvement of the socio-economic situation of the population based on the existing local community skills, talents and ideas.
The International Labour Organisation describes youth employment (YU) as a global challenge and a top policy concern, decrying an international state of affairs wherein 156 million young workers live in poverty and there are 71 million unemployed young people.
For the past 10 years, the Portuguese capital has gained significant practical experience, while creating, applying, and upgrading its Local Development Strategy for priority intervention areas. The document provides the municipality with a set of tools to tackle poverty and mitigate inequalities - social, economic, and educational. This happens with the joint efforts of the administration and local communities.
Based on its experience, Lisbon has created the so-called toolbox - a structured guideline on the creation of local development strategy, containing four instruments:
Mapping of the Priority Intervention Territories of the city, according to the overlapping of Social, Economic, Urban and Environmental deprivation indexes that express the fracture of the city.
Local Task Force: local structures that develop a co-governance framework involving the municipality, civil society organizations, local communities, and businesses.
Activator Grant: a program that funds and ignites local community projects aimed to respond to local needs, promoting local organizations partnerships, empowering local communities, and enabling sustainable urban development.
Collaborative Platform for Community-Led Local Development, which is a bottom-up co-governance network that develops a global strategy to priority intervention territories and promotes experience to enhance local partners’ skills.
What makes this toolbox extremely scalable is the fact that it could be adapted to very different realities and contexts, but the logical connections between the instruments always stay the same.
The knowledge transferring journey
By participating in Com.Unity.Lab, Sofia has the opportunity to exchange experiences, good practices and innovative approaches for social inclusion and integration of problem areas. The project is implemented by Sofia Municipality, represented by Sofiaplan - the municipal enterprise for spatial and strategic planning , Department for Integration of People with Disabilities, Programs and Projects, and Directorate for European Policies and Programs. The Com.Unity.Lab network consists of one leading partner - Lisbon and seven participating partners Bari, Aalborg, Sofia, Ostrava, Lublin, The Hague, and Lille.
The network allows the different cities to share their best practices and receive feedback from each other. Apart from the program workshops, the Sofia team initiated bilateral meetings with the leading partner to receive detailed consulting on their methodology for urban planning units assessment. Additionally, a gamification method for engaging local communities in the process of urban planning was presented by the Lisbon team.
Com.Unity.Lab Sofia - the right piece of the puzzle
In 2019 Sofia officially joined the Com.Unity.Lab network, focusing on two specific areas: the creation of a Social Cohesion Map and adoption of best practices on the inclusion of local communities in urban planning. But this was just the beginning, as a greater opportunity appeared on their horizon.
In 2020 the municipal enterprise Sofiaplan started working onthe Program for Sofia. This is the Integrated territorial investment strategy (ITI) of Sofia Municipality for the period 2021-2027. The strategic document defines the medium-term goals and priorities for sustainable integrated development of the city. The process of creating the Program includes the identification of priority areas for intervention and specific projects that will be implemented.
These circumstances allowed Sofia to utilize the Com.Unity.Lab learnings when crafting the city’s ITI strategy. More specifically in the following three steps:
The Com.Unity.Lab mapping instrument was adapted to support the creation of a very comprehensive analysis of the entire municipality. The final goal of this mapping is to capture the current state of Sofia from a variety of perspectives, assessing the city's green system, access to education, health care, social service, transportation, etc.
The second step of the Program for Sofia is the identification of areas with the greatest need for intervention and project realization, where the good practices from the Lisbon mapping instrument were once more applied.
Following the Com.Unity.Lab toolbox recommendations, the Program for Sofia plan included the crucial step for consultation with local communities, businesses, and administration in these areas in the form of local working groups.
As part of the Program for Sofia, Sofiaplan team is creating the so-called passports of each urban-planning unit (i.e. neighbourhood). The passports present information for the current state of the unit based on its population, green system, building stock, number of schools, accessibility, cultural facilities, etc. In the long term this approach will be used for the city’s so called parametric planning process. Based on the detailed information for each unit and its estimated potential, the parametric planning process will allow Sofiaplan to generate different scenarios on how a specific development goal for the area could be achieved.
What to expect from the Program for Sofia
The Program for Sofia aims to point towards the most well-reasoned and necessary for the city project ideas. The main task of the Program is to achieve an integrated approach in urban planning and coordinate the efforts of various stakeholders.
The Program for Sofia is expected to be completed in mid- 2021 and subsequently to be discussed and adopted by the Sofia Municipal Council. Within three months after the adoption of the Program, it will be presented to the Regional Development Council.
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The Com.Unity.Lab project is funded by the European Union's URBACT III Program, which supports the construction and development of networks between European cities to promote sustainable and integrated urban development. The program is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. The leading partner is Lisbon (Portugal), in partnership with the cities of Sofia, Bari (Italy), Lublin (Poland), Ostrava (Czech Republic), Lille (France), Aalborg (Denmark), and The Hague (Netherlands).
We can improve public services for local communities and individuals by giving them more control rather than imposing top down governmental programmes on them. This belief has led to a boom in “participative budgets” witnessed across Europe (and the world), as one of the easiest tools putting rights in the hands of communities. However, there has been less attention on the individual level, i.e., personal budget schemes that could activate citizens to make a change in their lives. URBACT CHANGE! partner city Aarhus (DK) was recently awarded the URBACT Good Practice Call label for its pioneering personal budget scheme tackling long-term unemployment. This article gives an overview of this innovative set of policy tools and suggests we might pay more attention to them.
Anne Mette, a graphic designer living in Aarhus, had been out of the job market for a lengthy period, mainly caring for her three young kids and chronically ill husband. Looking to return to work, she found herself in an extremely challenging situation when the local Jobcentre asked her the following question: what could she do with a personal grant of ca. €6725 if she could decide how to spend it in order to get a job. She hesitated but finally took the opportunity. Anne launched a micro-business with the grant. Now she produces hand-made, leather aprons for local restaurants with a great and increasing success. This is still not a big business, but a huge first step for Anne Mette.
Sharing responsibility leads to stronger citizenship
When you are unemployed, “you actually start thinking to yourself that you indeed cannot do anything to change your situation” – Anne Mette says in the short film published on the CHANGE! website by Aarhus. What Aarhus is experimenting now within its “Long-term unemployed take the lead” initiative is to share the responsibility related to public services between the public and the personal level. Participative budgets, already a well-known policy tool at community level seem to be working on a personal level too. So what are the benefits and the potential risks when a city authority intends to revolutionise its governance by sharing responsibility with citizens?
Understanding the power of responsibility sharing by local leaders was one of the main milestones when Porto Alegre in Brazil launched the world’s first participative or as sometimes called citizen budget in 1989. Today we are witnessing the expansion of this tool worldwide. In the URBACT CHANGE! network for example, Gdańsk (PL) and Amarante (PT) have experience on how to capitalise on the vibrant and growing power of direct involvement of people and communities. How to share decision-making, how to enable communities to work with budget holders to define local priorities, identify available resources and allocate these resources accordingly is a key learning point both for the respective councils and local people (see the CHANGE! Baseline Study or the case study on Gdańsk and Amarante).
So what are the benefits of participatory budgeting? Why do hundreds of European cities allocate resources for such initiatives? The story starts with the individuals involved: they feel themselves empowered, listened to and engaged, even if the money allocated for participatory budgets is very small in comparison with the city’s overall budget. More importantly, participatory budgeting can increase the connectedness of those involved, and such a tool also improves the understanding of public services within the local community. In addition, practitioners and leaders feel supported and understood and all of this generates greater trust and community cohesion, even if budget decisions are not specifically linked to local neighbourhoods.
But we also know that there are several challenges regarding participatory budgets, mainly linked to their sustainability. Maintaining the increased, but rather sensitive trust generated by such an action requires strong commitment, especially from political leaders. Participatory budgets are not just an interesting “toy” to offer for the public before elections. It is indeed a challenge not only to maintain the volume of the first initiative in terms of the territories covered, budget and interest, but to increase the potential impact in all senses. Experience shows that it is often hard to maintain the atmosphere of this new engagement – and it is always easy to lose them.
Long-term unemployed take the lead
The Danish city of Aarhus, in cooperation with the Velux Foundation, has been running this ground-breaking social experiment since the beginning of 2016 in the city. Jobcentre Aarhus hosts this pilot in which long-term unemployed persons over 30 years of age who have been on cash benefits for at least one year can prepare their own budgets to finance initiatives aimed at finding employment for them (support is up to DKK 50,000 per participant, ca. €6725€). The pilot involves 100 participants in two years and gets high attention both from national institutions and the press due to its innovative character.
The participants can apply for money for everything ranging from acquiring a driver’s licence and upgrading courses to new suits or electric bicycles. Funds may be disbursed to the project participants for any given purpose as long as the individual participants can account for how this will bring them closer to employment. The vision is that the individual becomes the driving force in their own job performance and that this will increase their chances of getting a job.
Although final assessment is not available yet, based on interviews (Status Report by City of Aarhus) made in January 2017 with a total of 34 participants, some initial, but promising messages can be derived. Initial results show that 14 out of 27 applicants who took part in phases 2 and 3 are no longer on unemployment benefits. In addition, based on the interviews most participants felt:
That someone has confidence in them
A renewed faith in their ability to find a job
A boost to their personal and vocational self-confidence
That the job consultant can finally provide them with assistance that they can use
Participants feel that the project differs from the usual programmes by:
Being tailored to meet their specific needs
Being built on trust from the job consultant, rather than control
Being based on the participant’s own initiative and responsibility
Resulting in marked personal ownership of the process.
Personalising social care
Before launching its initiative Aarhus has analysed some examples in England, where “there is agreement across the social care sector that personalisation, through personal budgets, is the right way forward and that well-implemented, personalised services benefit users and result in better outcomes. England is leading the world in personalising social care but this means that we are breaking new ground” (Personal budgets in social care, Second Report of Session 2016-2017).
In England, personal budgets in social care are sums of money allocated by a local authority to service users to be spent on services to meet their care needs. They can be managed on behalf of users by the authority, or a third party, or given to users as direct payments: money to spend themselves. They enable users to have more choice and control over the services they receive, tailoring their care to their personal circumstances and the outcomes they want to achieve. “When implemented well, personal budgets allow adults to try new ways to meet their social care needs, give them more choice and control over the care they receive and give them the opportunity to achieve the outcomes they want from their care” – states the above report. However, using personal budgets for employment is a relatively new topic in England too. According to the results of the first initiatives regarding employment, where personal budgets for employment support have been experimented with, they can and do work. “We therefore feel it should be the priority to ensure employment support can be accessed through adult social care personal budgets”- recommends the above report.
There are also lots of criticism and risks around implementing personal budget schemes. The most obvious challenge is that more vulnerable users, and those who lack mental capacity, will find it more difficult to take control of their care. They are less likely to be able to make good decisions on their own about how best to meet their care needs. Only a complex system can differentiate such a service to maximise benefits to users. In addition to this, yet in more advanced countries like the UK, the government has not gathered enough evidence yet on what are the best ways to personalise care services to maximise the benefits to users. This is why the above UK report recommends for the central government to set up a robust system to monitor personal budget schemes.
Another core question, which should be answered by the evaluation of Aarhus’ experiment is how to differentiate the system related to the barriers different people face when applying for personalised care. Aarhus’ experiment started on the way that the job consultants themselves selected the most potential participants for self-budgeting, while participants in latter phases were randomly selected through registration numbers on the basis of some predefined criteria. This process resulted in an increase in the number of citizens who declined the offer to participate in that scheme. This is a crucial point here. As some people face more barriers to utilising such a personalised scheme, Aarhus’ experiment and all other similar systems should also evaluate who might be more likely to benefit such an innovative tool.
Aarhus’s experiment also tackled this issue through an organisational method. The pilot offered two different courses for participants: a collective- and an individual one. In the collective courses participants meet with other applicants and thus they can learn from other’s experiences with self-budgeting. In the individual courses participants meet one-on-one with their case manager. The results so far indicate that peer support might have a crucial role: participants strongly prefer collective courses where they can get inspiration from peers, as some find it challenging to figure out what they want to spend the money on. They feel more comfortable discussing ideas with fellow unemployed citizens than with case managers.
The role of cities regarding changing care systems
Local authorities’ role within the public service delivery varies country by country and legislation is set at national or regional level. It seems that cities have a less important role in managing the change required within service delivery. Although it is not yet clear how local authorities can implement personal budgets in different countries, we do hope that in the future more and more municipalities, as the closest level of the public sphere to local communities will come up with solutions targeting public service reform. Also from URBACT cities...
“Creating a united society takes a united effort. In order to maintain and develop a robust social and economic welfare society, politicians, citizens, businesses, associations and municipal employees must rethink how we work together”. This is set by Aarhus in its ‘Active Citizenship Policy’, a general policy framework created in 2016. Following this mind-set and carefully going further with participatory budgets is thus recommended for all municipalities: keep the momentum and improve the existing participative budgets with the involvement of strong community institutions for neighbourhood governance (e.g. neighbourhood councils, installing local innovation brokers) and set up other incentives such as community dividends! Following the first successful steps to share responsibilities with the communities, it is also recommended to experiment the power of responsibility sharing through personal budgets, even though this seems to be a more risky and complex tool!
Welfare 2.0
Last, but not least it is worth mentioning the bigger picture. Personal budget schemes are a great example to test and demonstrate how an ideal public service provision should work. “Welfare State products used to be good solutions for the previous, rather predictable life paths, but, in nowadays’ globalised world, they are simply not good enough anymore and they are also becoming more and more expensive” - said Jeroen Hoenderkamp, strategic advisor of the city of Eindhoven, where a pioneer model, the WeEindhoven is being tested. Due to austerity measures local authorities across Europe must save money in times when demand for social care rises. The most effective response resulting in ‘doing more for less’ is often called as Relational or Preventive Welfare.
Existing top-down services too often reproduce social inequalities, create dependency and cannot efficiently tackle new problems (ageing societies, constant labour market disparities, migration, the scale of inequality, etc). In addition to this, existing services are poor at preventing social problems, and better equipped for reacting to emergencies, which is very expensive. A growing amount of evidence shows that top-down service delivery is too often a rather expensive way of maintaining the status-quo of those disadvantaged families who lack basic skills and are thus not able to break out of the vicious circle of support claiming.
“We are in the middle of a fundamental transformation of the welfare state. We are breaking with the classical conception of welfare as a standard benefit or service, and we are breaking with the time when a case manager could offer a standard product to all citizens. In these years the municipalities are making experiments with new forms of welfare – co-created with citizens and businesses.” – said Anne Eg Jensen from Aarhus in her article about the above personal budget initiative.
At the moment we can witness different experiments on very different scale in Europe. Whatever will be the outcomes of these initiatives, and whatever will be recommended by the first evidence, at the moment it seems that effective services are those that are local, that help people help themselves and focus on people’ capabilities instead of their needs. Personal budgets are pioneering examples of this change.
The motto at the Department of labour market in the city of Trelleborg (SE) is that “you get what you ask for”. The city decided to see what would happen if it stopped asking regional trade and industry for general activities for unemployed people, and started asking for jobs instead.
Unemployed citizens need support to enter the labour market. In both 2015 and 2016, thanks to the city's collaboration with over 500 local and regional employers, one person per day leaves welfare support for a new job, or starts studies that will lead to employment.
The solutions offered by the good practice
Due to employers not finding skilled labour, the economy is not only sufficiently growing, we also see that with the age composition of the labour force, we have fewer workers paying for a welfare system with increasing costs for the elderly. People having trouble in establishing themselves on the labour market, among them foreign jobseekers with a shorter education, or young people lacking completion of upper secondary school, are sorely needed in the workforce to make sure that the welfare state doesn’t fail. By using a coupling-system, where the city cooperates with the local employers, thus benefitting both the unemployed and the employers, we make sure that the gap between both is closed. Different methods are used for different couplings; some people need more time to get the skills requested by the job, while others just need an introduction. In our couplings, we make sure both parties’ needs are met.
Building on the sustainable and integrated approach
Under the umbrella of the Kraftsamling Trelleborg project, we cooperate with local businesses to make sure that they are provided with the service they need, and find competent staff in order to grow. In Kraftsamling, all employers have a prospective partner through which they can channel their CSR-work. Our objective is to make sure that unemployed gain employment, but this can only be obtained through meeting the needs of the individual employer.
Based on a participatory approach
The Kraftsamling Trelleborg good practice puts jobseekers and local businesses in contact, in order to make sure that firms are provided with the service they need, and find competent staff in order to grow. In Kraftsamling, all employers have a prospective partner through which they can channel their CSR-work. Our objective is to make sure that unemployed people gain employment, but this can only be obtained through meeting the needs of the individual employer.
What difference has it made?
During 2015 and 2016, we have put one average person per day back to work (or studies leading to work), primarily due to our cooperation with the local and regional employers, under the auspices of not belonging to the labour force by the national employment agency. This is due to our belief that everyone can learn, and that companies need to be involved in this learning. A taste of our model that gives effective results for the citizens of the city of Trelleborg: • From control to personal responsibility and trust; • From telephone hours to total availability; • From a focus on rights to contributions to self-sufficiency; • From care plan to establishment plan; • From social services to efficient management of subsistence allowance; • From waiting to visit today and decision tomorrow. Since the last tent years, the trend in Sweden has been an increase in costs for welfare support. This trend has been the opposite in Trelleborg, with declining costs and an increase in employment.
Why should other European cities use it?
One of the current and future challenges for European cities is to make sure that all citizens are included in the labour market, and at the same time to avoid that companies’ growth is hindered by the lack of skilled labour. This current challenge will only grow more challenging, considering the fact that Europe has welcomed immigrants fleeing from war in the Middle East. We are convinced that all European cities have good strategies for vocational training in schools, but we also believe that flexible ways of learning at a workplace give quicker results. One way of learning does not exclude the other, but one might be more useful in certain situations.
