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
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
Last week, on the 9 March, URBACT's Monitoring Committee have approved five pilot networks to transfer innovative solutions. In 2020, the UIA first call projects came to a close and a proposal was made to test a new URBACT tool which aimed to support the transfer of innovation. The UIA Transfer Mechanism experiment will support a group of EU cities to understand, adapt and prepare to re-use the UIA practice through the co-creation of an investment plan. The 18-month journey of these networks builds on the success of the URBACT Transfer Networks model.
Following a competitive call, 7 pilot projects were submitted for approval. When considering all the 28 potential city partners, 6 candidates were URBACT newcomer cities from 5 different countries, while 16 cities were also newcomers to UIA. This shows what a unique opportunity this networks represented for cities discovering the universe of EU cooperation! As foreseen by the Terms of Reference, eligible proposals have been assessed by a two assesors from URBACT and UIA. Scroll down to find out more about the five newly approved networks.
The URBACT Programme acknowledges and thanks every city that has submitted proposals and used the URBACT Marketplace for this call. URBACT also warmly welcomes the new UIA Transfer Mechanism partners, who will take their first steps in the kick-off meeting on 23 March.
Anybody who has participated in an URBACT network and worked out constructive outcomes at local level can attest to the effectiveness of the URBACT method, but also to the fact that the ways of working it inspires can often seem more like the exception than the rule of ‘normal’ administrational functioning of cities.
Encouraging and enabling urban decision-makers and practitioners to think bigger, adopt more integrated approaches and practise co-creation in their professional life is the URBACT dream. Participating in URBACT networks is a sometimes difficult, sometimes joyful experience of breaking the silos of municipal departments and between public and non-public sectors.
But it can be difficult to imagine how a more integrated approach to city functioning can spread among cities that have never had the opportunity to participate in an URBACT network. I want to share a story about how just such a process has started to come true in Poland through the URBACT-inspired national ‘City Partnership Initiative’.
The broader European context was propitious: after adopting the Pact of Amsterdam, the first four partnerships of the EU Urban Agenda had recently started their activities and the next four partnerships were planning to recruit partners.
At the same time, the Polish government had just started implementation of the new national Strategy for Responsible Development – of which Specific Objective II (Socially and territorially sustainable development) opened the way for targeted projects for small and medium-sized cities. The Ministry of Infrastructure already had an idea for a specific City Partnership Initiative to reach small and medium-sized cities, but was not yet sure on the details of how to run such a project.
Meanwhile, as the Polish NUP, I was organising a national training session for the Polish cities involved in the first round of Action Planning Networks under URBACT III. Together with non-URBACT cities, ministry representatives and URBACT experts, the three-day event brought together 80 people in December 2016. Thanks to the facilitation of Piotr Wolkowinski, Lead Expert of the BoostInno network, all participants had a feeling to have raised their awareness on the possibilities offered by the URBACT method and the needs of the cities.
These parallel trends all leant towards the creation of a national initiative supporting exchange and networking among towns and cities in Poland towards the identification of local solutions for integrated sustainable urban development. The initiative would aim to combine the broader European approach to national urban policies with targeted support at the local level to provide city authorities with specific knowledge to address their identified needs.
How does the Polish URBACT operate?
The initiative was allocated a budget of 600 000 Zlotys for each network (approximately € 136 400 ) over three years and was designed to support many of the same actions as URBACT networks, including exchange and networking meetings among cities, PIM Local Groups of stakeholders in each participating city, and thematic experts to support each network.
The discussions at the URBACT seminar helped formulate possible areas of interest of city networking and exchange in Poland and the appropriate working method of the City Partnership Initiative, based largely on experiences of the URBACT method and the EU Urban Agenda Partnerships topics.
All cities participating in a network were expected to develop an integrated action plan (called a ‘City Action Initiative’ in the Polish context). Like URBACT Integrated Action Plans, these should be a co-designed set of concrete solutions to previously identified local challenges and problems.
On top of that, each network as a whole had to develop an Improvement Plan, a set of recommendations for the Ministry, to feed into future urban policies at the national level.
The City Partnership Initiative was given some more specifically defined objectives by the Ministry of Infrastructure:
Strengthening and encouraging partnership cooperation and exchange of knowledge between cities;
Capacity building among city officers and decision-makers;
Knowledge capitalisation and developing bottom-up system solutions;
Dissemination of the principles of social participation in city management;
Involving cities in the implementation of national and European urban development goals.
An initiative of this scale needed a thorough preparation of its building blocks. The Ministry, in close cooperation with the National URBACT Point, which provided the necessary knowledge, prepared a set of programme documents. These included “Rules of realisation of the City Partnership Initiative”, a “Guidebook for City Action Initiatives” and a “Guidebook for Local Partnerships”.
The PIM network on Urban Regeneration was led by Katowice and counted 11 Polish cities.
A first round of pilot city networks in Poland
The initiative launched its first call for city networks in 2017, focused on three pilot thematic networks on: 1. Urban Mobility; 2. Urban Regeneration; and 3. Air Quality.
The call was open to all urban areas in Poland, as well as associations of local governments. The initiative applied no restrictions on city size, but was clearly targeted and marketed at building the capacity and knowledge of small and medium-sized cities in Poland, which are starting to experience serious waves of depopulation.
Over 105 applications were received, indicating a high demand for this type of project. Of these, a total of 34 cities and associations of local government were selected across the three networks. Each network had an appointed thematic expert, designated by the Ministry. Their role was, as in URBACT networks, to support each network with substantive knowledge.
At each phase of the works of the three pilot networks, the National URBACT Point provided knowledge and know-how based on the long experience of cooperation with cities. However, the quantity of work quickly forced the Ministry to also open a call for an external body to provide practical support in the facilitation of the PIM Local Groups and guide them on a more daily basis.
Network meetings were organised on a regular basis, as well as combined meetings of the three networks together. For those used to URBACT national and transnational networking meetings, these occasions had a familiar atmosphere of friendly collaboration!
The final meeting of the three pilot networks took place in October 2019. A report was prepared to summarise their achievements, to finalise the Improvement Plans of each network, to compare the effectiveness of both the PIM and URBACT programmes and formulate the broad lines of the future activities of the project.
Szczecin Metropolitan Area was Lead Partner of the Urban Mobility network of nine Polish cities.
What have been the results so far?
The PIM initiative was an opportunity to test a new model of developing municipal initiatives and solutions for the development of towns and cities in Poland, based on exchange, partnership and cooperation. Its results have been entirely positive.
The PIM has succeeded in initiating cross-sectoral and multilevel cooperation around urban policies, involving representatives of the public, social and private sectors. It has proved to be an accelerator for municipalities to join efforts and establish cooperation in specific dimensions of urban policies.
This cooperation between local government units participating in the project allowed for the implementation and creation of better, more interesting and more inspiring ideas for the development of cities with the support of local stakeholders. The initiative gave the opportunity to practise new forms of cooperation with residents and consultation methods, as well as the opportunity to test innovative solutions in specific areas of urban policy – conducting pilots in local conditions.
All this might sound normal for URBACT veterans, but is an important leap forward for so many cities in Poland that had never had the opportunity to experience it.
The formula of the project allowed for effective learning – the greatest results were achieved when the participants worked together, when they were driven by joint discussions with people with different experiences. Network partners had the opportunity to avoid mistakes or use proven solutions.
For example, larger municipal units, more advanced in implementing policies related to air quality, urban mobility and revitalisation, showed smaller cities how to implement comprehensive policies, building the capacity and competence of officials from smaller centres.
In addition, the initiative enabled enhanced collaboration between participating cities and the national level - to streamline a new communication channel that allows better, more effective adjustment of urban policies created in the national ministries to the needs of local self-government communities.
Bialystok Funtional Area took over the role of Lead Partner of the Air Quality network from Nowy Sącz.
Further information
Drawing on this experience, a new call of the Polish ‘City Partnership Initiative’ is expected to be launched by the end of 2020 for three new networks, the topics of which are yet to be defined.
Cities have already signalled their interest in participating in the project. The new call will also develop further the ties with EU urban policies at national level.
As this initiative has demonstrated its attractiveness to cities and the ministry responsible for urban affairs, other countries have started to work on similar initiatives, aimed at involving more cities in new ways of developing local level urban policies.
Anyone interested in more information about this initiative can contact the National URBACT Point in Poland or the representative of the Ministry listed on the Polish NUP website.
The second URBACT City Lab took place in Brussels (BE) on 2nd and 3rd July 2019: “How are cities putting sustainable urban development into practice?” wa
s the core question that drove us through general and specific considerations in the fields of Air Quality and Mobility, Energy Transition and Climate Adaptation and Sustainable Food Systems. When seeking to feed into the work of the updated Leipzig Charter, it appeared that on the one hand sustainability is still a complex paradigm to get into and embed for a city, but on the other hand, cities are leading the way in what can be done.
Here are 5 golden rules for cities to become sustainable.
1. Sustainability is polysemic
Angeliki Stogia, Councilor at the City of Manchester (UK) asked us: “what do you, what do we, actually mean by sustainability?”. Although its official definition from the 1992 Brundtland Report is unambiguous, but, what does it mean and how should cities approach it? The realm of participants showed a variety of understandings. For example, for Filipa Pimentel from the Transition network it is for society to become more resilient, which in turn would make our ecosystems more resilient. From a people-based approach, to a planning-based one, focusing on regeneration (or the inclusion of environment in local policies) can only bring in consensus and a chance for all stakeholders to adjust their visions and priorities.
2. Sustainability should be tackled at all levels
Our discussions started with Thomas Béthune from DG REGIO, European Commission, stating his needs to be in touch with cities themselves to feed sustainability into European policies. They were wrapped up by Filipa Pimental who expressed the leadership of citizens who become actors of change. In between the two, the Leipzig Charter is focusing on neighbourhoods and Alicja Pawlowska, Head of EU projects and mobility management at the City of Gdynia (PL) stressed the importance of this in their daily work. Cities are where changes take place and these considerations stress the need for territorial and contextual approaches. This would be impossible without the collaboration and inputs from member states, as Olli Maijala, Adviser at Finnish Ministry of the Environment suggested.
3. Sustainability requires a new mindset
Experimenting in cities is not new, yet they need to keep on being innovative, combining social and technological innovation (e.g. Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) Vilawatt project in Viladecans (ES), developing market-based instruments (e.g. Stockholm’s successful congestion charges), in addition to nature-based solutions (e.g. Chinese sponge cities, which mainstream urban water management into the urban planning policies and designs), and consumption-based approaches (e.g. URBACT BioCanteens network) and to focus on processes.
Increasingly, cities need to change their vision, and to think out of the box and take risks. The inner change needs to look beyond traditional city-makers, including other profiles such as psychologists (as strongly supported by the Transition network and already tested in Gdansk (PL).
4. Sustainability applies to all
Sustainability applies to jobs and skills creation such as a Food Innovation Hub in Milan (IT) within the UIA OpenAgri project, as well as to the city of Gdynia seeking to make freight transport more effective in cities within URBACT FreightTails. Not to mention the H2020 Ruggedised where Rotterdam (NL) experiments smart city developments.
Mobility. Energy. Food. Air quality. Digitalisation. Health and well-being. Urban planning. Sustainability should be a transversal approach, and “business as usual” as Angeliki Stogia phrased it. In order to support this process, city governance should be rethought to be bold and to be participatory, with citizen scrutiny.
New forms of involvement and partnerships should be promoted as with the engagement of citizens in air quality control within Helsinki’s (FI) UIA Hope project; the public-private-citizen partnership for energy production in Viladecans’ UIA Vilawatt project; or the use of culture and arts to mobilise citizens to address climate change in the URBACT C-Change network.
Sustainability also requires cross-departmental collaboration such as in the City of Schaerbeek (BE) cross-cutting solutions which tackle social environmental and neighborhood issues within an action-research project on organic waste transformation, Phosphore.
5. Sustainability requires strong leadership
Leadership for sustainability can happen at all levels of cities. Angeliki Stogia from Manchester, Gilles Perole from Mouans-Sartoux (FR) (lead partner of BioCanteens) and Laura Rodrigues from Torres Verdas (PT) (2015 Green Leaf Capital City) are the elected representatives who took part in this second URBACT City Lab, confirming their city’s commitment to this challenge. This is just the beginning of a global movement of awareness and action towards more sustainability in cities.
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The key principles of the original Leipzig Charter provided the focus for each URBACT City Lab.
The 2007 Leipzig Charter established the EU’s urban policy principles. Ahead of its 2020 EU Presidency, Germany is refreshing this key document. URBACT’s City Labs, linked to the Charter’s principles, are supporting this process. The Labs will identify what works, where cities are struggling, and how we can build their capacity to build a bright sustainable future.
What comes to mind when we think about effective urban policy? We’d probably say that it should be sustainable, focusing o
n the best use of our resources and the wellbeing of the planet. We might add that it should involve different levels of government – including cities themselves – in decision-making. As levels of trust in politicians are historically low, we might also underline the need for participation – particularly the involvement of citizens – in our processes.
Back in 2007, the principles behind this approach to urban policy were captured in a single EU document for the first time. Under the German EU Presidency, the Leipzig Charter proposed a model of effective urban policy – sustainable, integrated, participative, multi-level – which anticipated much of what we take for granted today. For example, we can see these principles reflected in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Urban Agenda for the EU, which continue to shape much of our work in cities.
URBACT City Labs
In the second half of 2020 Germany will assume the EU Presidency again. In anticipation of that, work is under way to refresh the Leipzig Charter’s relevance for Europe of the 2020s and beyond.
URBACT will support this through a series of City Labs related to the Leipzig Charter principles. The first, exploring the principle of Participation took place in Lisbon (PT) in September 2018. The second, in Brussels (BE) on 2nd and 3rd July, examined the principle of Sustainable Development. The final City Lab in Berlin (DE) will combine our key messages in the spring of 2020.
Each Lab will explore how these principles are understood now. There will be space to examine what works well – how cities are embedding these principles in their approaches – as well investigating where the barriers are. A key question relates to the obstacles preventing more cities from adopting these principles – and what needs to be done to support them.
Participative Cities
From our City Lab on Participation it was clear that 2019 looks very different to 2007. Linked to diminishing levels of trust in established institutions, we see declining levels of political participation, particularly at the local level. There are also rising incidences of civil unrest, combined with the growth of populism in many parts of Europe.
These are fast changing developments to which many city authorities are struggling to respond. However, our City Lab activity shows that many cities are adopting a proactive approach, with a willingness to experiment and to redefine the working relationship with citizens. The driver for this is recognition that our established governance tools no longer meet our needs – particularly in the digital age.
Our first City Lab report captures some of the headline activities. Amongst these is Decide Madrid, a leading digital platform for engaging citizens in urban decision-making. It has grown from a modest process to redesign a city square to one with almost half a million registered members.
Citizens have submitted more than 20 000 proposals via the portal, which commits the city to implementing those receiving enough backing from citizens. Voting is a mix of postal and digital platforms, with over 200 projects funded to date through a budget of EUR 100 million.
The importance of mixing digital and face-to-face mechanisms is also a clear message from other cities. Influenced by their monumental and greatly missed former Mayor, Pawel Adamowicz, Gdansk (PL) has also pioneered new ways to engage citizens in decision-making, not least through the design and implementation of Citizens Assemblies, a methodology which is attracting a growing volume of interest amongst decision makers. At the City Lab, officials from Gdansk spoke about the influence of URBACT in shaping their approach to citizen engagement.
Devolving financial decisions also emerges as an important way to increase levels of citizen engagement. Participative budgets are another effective tool to enable this, as two URBACT good practices demonstrate. Paris (FR) has a large sophisticated model operating at city and neighbourhood level as well as involving young people through schools. However, the city of Cascais,
in Portugal, shows that these approaches work in cities of all sizes. Its model now accounts for 18% of the total investment budget and has directly involved 115 000 citizens, more than half the population.
Nearby, the Portuguese capital, Lisbon (PT), has also experimented successfully with the Community Led Local Development (CLLD) model. The subject of an earlier URBACT article, this approach has focused on the city’s most deprived 67 neighbourhoods, enabling investment of over €9 million channeled through over 250 projects. Two interesting dimensions of the approach are its strong focus on neighbourhood capacity building and the requirement placed on grassroots organisations to collaborate. This URBACT Good Practice is at the heart of a Transfer network called Com.Unity Lab.
The City Lab also underlined ways to involve specific sections of our communities that may be under-represented. Braga (PT) explained their approach to youth engagement, building on their URBACT experience, whilst Parma (IT) shared their work to encourage women to be more actively involved, a key dimension of URBACT’s Gender Equal Cities campaign.
What's ahead?
The URBACT City Labs are shining a light on effective city solutions. They are also underlining where we are getting stuck, and what must be done to implement more effective urban policy. In this way, they are feeding directly into the future version of the Leipzig Charter, and a better future for Europe’s cities.
You can join us, by following our City Lab news (@URBACT #CityLab), and by participating in future events.
The key principles of the original Leipzig Charter provided the focus for each URBACT City Lab.
Naples’ Urban Civic Uses policy is characterised by the way artists, creatives, innovators and city inhabitants are entitled to organise themselves to establish forms of self-government for critical social infrastructure including urban commons such as abandoned, unused or underused city assets. Christian Iaione, URBACT Lead Expert, tells us how Naples’ Good Practice is being transferred to other European cities thanks to the Civic eState project.
The Civic eState network is all about the policy challenge of recognising and/or co-designing legal and sustainable urban commons governance mechanisms enabling city inhabitants and local communities constitutional rights to collectively act in the general interest.
The urban commons are tangible and intangible assets, services and infrastructures functional to the exercise of fundamental rights considered by the city of Naples as collectively owned and therefore removed from the “exclusive use” proprietary logic to be governed through civic “direct management”.
The revitalisation of the urban historical heritage represents a cultural, economic and social challenge, but also a spur for the city to re-elaborate its identity, creating a new bond with and between the local activists, civic entrepreneurs and the active citizenship scene.
The city of Naples carved out a policy based on several city council and mayor’s office resolutions to overcome the traditional top-down command-and-control approach bringing city inhabitants to the centre of the decision-making and city assets management process, strengthening participation in political decisions relevant for the care and regeneration of the urban commons.
These are new policy tools that aim to give back to the community public and private abandoned properties.
Transferring Naples’ Good Practice on urban commons collective governance
Naples’ Good Practice consists of enabling collective management of urban essential facilities conceived as urban commons. This public-community governance approach secures fair and open access, co-design, preservation and a social and economic sustainability model of urban assets and infrastructures, all for the benefit of future generations.
Collective governance is carried out through the involvement of the community of neighbourhood inhabitants in designing, experimenting, managing, and delivering new forms of cultural and social services.
The network’s objective is to transfer, with appropriate adaptations and improvements, Naples’ Good Practice to partner cities: Barcelona (ES), Gdansk (PL), Ghent (BE), Amsterdam (NL), Iasi (RO) and Presov (SK).
The path to civic use
During the last decade, the city of Naples has been experimenting with new urban governance tools to give new life to abandoned and/or deprived buildings. Different movements and informal organizations have highlighted the need for such spaces to be used and managed by city inhabitants in common through self-organization mechanisms that turn such spaces into new institutions. The civic use of these empty buildings implied a temporary use and it represented a starting point for their “renaissance”. It also created a stimulus to start searching for innovative mechanisms to use such spaces as community-managed or a community-managed estate.
By revisiting the ancient legal institution of “civic use” and adapting it to the urban context, the administration structured a new form of participatory governance that intends to go beyond the classic “concession agreement model”, which is based on a dichotomous view of the public-private partnership.
The civic use recognises the existence of a relationship between the community and these public assets. This process makes community-led initiatives recognisable and institutionalised, ensuring the autonomy of both parties involved. On one hand the citizens are engaged in the reuse of the urban commons and on the other hand the city administration enables the practice.
Urban commons
The first asset recognised as common property, to be managed through the collective governance mechanism of the civic use, was the ex-asilo Filangieri, an URBACT Good Practice (resolution of Naples City Council n. 893/2015). It is there that the first Declaration of Civic and Collective Urban Use was carved out.
The recognition will be finalised with appropriate agreements after the communities managing the spaces draft a Declaration of Civic and Collective Use, on the model of those of the ex-asilo, securing inclusivity, accessibility, impartiality and usability of the governance of the assets.
In the future, the list can be enriched with more urban common resources. These assets were unutilised or under-utilised urban buildings and spaces, informally occupied and re-generated by informal communities that animate them and still contribute to their regeneration (in many cases, the renovation works could not be completed at the beginning of the informal management and were carried out through self-funding schemes). These assets constitute the civic heritage of the city of Naples, co-used and co-managed by Naples’ city inhabitants in the general interest.
Public-civic partnerships: a transferable model
Naples’ Good Practice (i.e. the civic uses resolution) has forged one of the first examples of a new generation of public partnerships, the public-community or public-civic partnership (PCPs). PCPs are aimed at transforming city assets into sustainable social infrastructures that produce public value and social impact through social & solidarity, cultural & creative, collaborative, digital and circular economy initiatives.
Nicola Masella, lead partner, stresses the value of the Naples’ Good Practice for the EU by saying that “the mechanism proposed by the city of Naples, although anchored in the Italian legal system, is certainly characterised by a high degree of adaptability to other European urban contexts as it is based on largely shared ethical, legal and social values. In contrast to the models proposed by other Italian and European cities, where the municipality is in charge of setting up of the rules for the management of commons, the tool implemented in Naples has been built by recognising the citizens’ self-organization models, through a continuous exchange between the community and the municipality.”
A blueprint for the future?
The Civic eState approach could generate a prototype methodology for cities to generate a new breed of cooperative agreements or projects between city governments and civic, social, local businesses aimed at developing cities through an integrated approach. In particular the civic uses resolution could be considered a blueprint for a larger category of legal tools in compliance with EU law, especially the relevant EU legislation on public procurement and state aid, stifling cooperation among urban actors in order to build and deliver social infrastructure and services such as education, healthcare and housing.
It might also be able to generate through the hybridisation of these places and economic models new community-based job opportunities and forms of civic entrepreneurships. These cooperative agreements, partnerships or projects could be the basis for more sophisticated and solid forms of financing that could fund social projects through new funding mechanisms including social impact bonds, social project finance schemes and many other new public-private partnerships that involve the participation of long-term investors to generate a sustainability model through social bonds and impact investing mechanisms.
Version dating back from October 2015. Strategy for the contribution of URBACT III to Europe 2020 and the achievement of economic, social and territorial cohesion.
A few kilometres south of Gdańsk’s world famous port, next to a roaring bypass, is the district of Orunia. For decades this area has been synonymous with neglect. Plagued by underinvestment and a lack of public spaces, and prone to flooding, it is an example of Poland’s ‘sociological vacuum’. This term, which is usually linked to the legacy of communism, describes a process where individuals retreat into small communities of family and close friends, with little participation in civic life.
Among Polish cities, the municipality of Gdańsk has shown a particular commitment to challenging this phenomenon. One of the best examples can be seen in the neighbourhood house scheme. These spaces began to be established in 2010 on the initiative of local activists who were inspired by the British model of community centres. They are funded by municipal grants but everyday management is delegated entirely to NGOs and citizens’ collectives. Crucially, they do not serve a single group but are there to provide activities for the neighbourhood as a whole.
Orunia is home to one of the first and most successful examples. The district’s neighbourhood house receives over 1 000 visits a month and functions, among other things, as a youth centre, debate club and immigration advice centre. The surrounding area has also seen a 1 000% increase in social initiatives since it was established.
A house for every district
Despite success stories like these, it became clear after a few years that the initiative wasn’t going to spread on its own. “Naming a place a neighbourhood house seemed to mean different things for different people,” says Monika Chabior, an activist from Gdańsk. “Lots of people saw it as too much responsibility to find the location, people to run the place and deal with finance. We realised we needed some processes for evaluating who we were and what our goals were.”
And so Ms Chabior and her colleagues sought inspiration from other European cities in the URBACT CHANGE! network. By being in this network, Gdańsk set up a local group of stakeholders (URBACT Local Group) to exchange with their European peers and to find solutions to the challenges they faced.
“Thanks to conversations in this local group, we made the decision to organise some smaller scale alternatives to neighbourhood houses, called clubs,” says Ms Chabior. “Unlike full-scale houses, these can be used for specific groups or single communities, and anyone can set them up.” Early signs suggest these intermediary structures have been an effective way of bypassing the perceived difficulty of developing neighbourhood houses. The hope now is that this will reignite a spontaneous expansion of different kinds of community centres across the city, led by a diverse group of local animators.
A broader impact is also being seen in local politics. Ahead of municipal elections in October 2018, neighbourhood houses and community organising have been unusually high on the agenda. “This was a great success of the URBACT Local Group activities,” confirms Ms Magdalena Skiba, from the municipality's Department of Social Development. “Every candidate is talking about these issues, they are all promising more money, and neighbourhood houses for every district. Of course we have concerns, these spaces need real community leaders, but thanks to our work, the houses now have visibility like never before.”
Learning from other cities: an asset to the project
“It was useful for us to focus on concrete solutions. We encountered a lot of subtle things that we wouldn’t have been able to see in, say, a document.” says Ms Chabior. During a visit to Rotterdam (NL), her team reflected on new ways of delegating roles to tackle a growing problem of exhaustion among managers of the neighbourhood houses. They also found inspiration in Eindhoven’s (NL) concept of a generalist, a mediator between residents and specialists who uses a personal approach to engage potentially marginalised groups. This was identified as a possible model for social workers in Gdańsk.
It was a workshop on community organisation in London (UK), however, that provided the most transferable tools. “In the local group, one of our plans was to develop integration in and between districts,” says Magdalena Skiba. “For me, as a person coming from a department in charge of monitoring, supervision and control of public social services, to develop a common understanding among civil servants, service providers and activists was a very useful experience. This meeting also showed us that public administration has or can develop new tools to empower local communities to take over responsibility for their neighbourhoods.”
Back in Poland the local group decided to build a dedicated space to encourage similar silo-breaking exchanges within the city. The Gdańsk School of Solidarity Everyday brought facilitators from neighbourhood houses together with municipal workers, social economy managers and other stakeholders to discuss how to stimulate bottom-up participation. Alongside local examples, the group studied URBACT Good Practices and drew up plans for a People To People (P2P) platform through which people might co-create a shared pedagogy in order to exchange knowledge more efficiently.
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You can find the Cities in Action - Stories of Change publication just here.
Eddy Adams, SIX Adviser and URBACT Programme Expert says Europe’s cities are widening civic participation to innovate, drive change and nourish democracy.
Decide Madrid (ES) is perhaps the world’s leading digital platform for engaging citizens in urban decision-making. With almost half a million registered members, it has re-wired the way Madrileños engage with local government. On 11th April 2019 URBACT will hold a capacity building event for cities looking to learn from Madrid’s experience.
This will be a hands-on session, aimed at equipping participants with the basic know-how to adapt this approach in their own context. URBACT has co-designed it with Decide Madrid, and the programme will support participation of stakeholders from URBACT cities. Further details and the registration link can be found here.
The stimulus for this event came from a series of City Lab activities that URBACT is conducting in relation to the Leipzig Charter. The charter introduced many of the key principles at the heart of today’s EU urban policy. The City Labs explore these and ways in which cities are interpreting and implementing them now. Participation is one of these principles, and the Decide Madrid approach was identified as a positive model in our first City Lab session.
This article refers to the principles established by the Leipzig Charter. It also explains the URBACT City Lab approach and focuses on the key learning points from the Participation session held in Lisbon in late 2018. Finally, it refers to leading city work in encouraging civic participation, and what needs to happen to encourage more cities to fully embrace the participation principle.
The URBACT City Labs
2007 seems like a long time ago now. This was just before the Global Financial Crisis hit the buffers, when social media seemed like a passing fad and the word BREXIT hadn’t even been coined. In that year, under the German EU Presidency, the Leipzig Charter proposed an ambitious set of principles relating to urban policy.
The Charter broke new ground. For the first time it underlined the need to have all levels of government at the table when urban issues were under debate. Most importantly, it stressed that cities had to be there – with an active voice – as equal players with national and EU level bodies. It also articulated a set of principles that have shaped urban policy in Europe – and beyond – since that point, most recently articulated through the subsequent Urban Agenda for the EU.
Fast forward to now and Germany is once more preparing to assume the EU Presidency in the second part of 2020. As it does so, work is under way to revisit and to refresh the Leipzig Charter.
The principles that came from the Charter – such as Participation, Integration and Sustainability – have long been at the centre of URBACT’s work. However, more than a decade after the charter’s appearance, these concepts are still not universally understood. In a European Commission survey of Baltic State cities last year, 8 out of 14 said that they were unclear about the concept of integrated sustainable urban development. Even when cities are clear on the concepts, they often struggle to implement them.
That is why URBACT is organising a series of City Labs related to the Leipzig Charter principles. Five of these will take place between 2018 and 2020, with the first four each focused on a key principle. The first, exploring the principle of Participation took place in Lisbon in September 2018. The fifth will bring together all of our key messages and will be held in Berlin in the spring of 2020.
In each City Lab our focus will be on how these principles are understood now. There will be space in each Lab to examine what is working well - how cities are embedding these principles in their approaches – as well as the opportunity to examine where they are getting stuck. A key question relates to the obstacles preventing more cities from adopting these principles – and what needs to be done about them.
Talking about Participation…
Talking about civic participation, what do we see as the main differences between 2019 and 2007? A number of trends seem evident. One is diminishing levels of trust in established institutions. Linked to this, we see declining levels of political participation, particularly at the local level. There are also rising incidences of civil unrest, combined with the growth of populism in many parts of Europe.
These are fast changing developments that many city authorities are struggling to respond to. However, Our City Lab activity clearly shows that many cities are adopting a proactive approach, characterized by a willingness to experiment and to redefine the working relationship with citizens. The driver for this is often a belief that our established governance tools no longer meet our needs – particularly in the digital age.
This was the starting point in the Portuguese city of Cascais, where local voting rates had fallen to below 40% by 2011. In response, it created a participatory budget model that is now widely acknowledged to be exemplary. Using a mix of digital and traditional engagement tools, Cascais has built this so that it now accounts for 18% of the total investment budget and has directly involved 115,00 citizens, more than half the population. This Cascais approach has been recognised with an URBACT Good Practice award.
In nearby Lisbon, another URBACT Good Practice is at the heart of a new Transfer network called Com.Unity.Lab. Devolving power and promoting citizen participation is also at the heart of this activity, specifically the city’s innovative Community Led Local Development (CLLD) model. The subject of an earlier URBACT article, this approach has focused on the city’s most deprived 67 neighbourhoods, enabling investment of over €9 million channelled through over 250 projects. Two interesting dimensions of the approach are its strong focus on neighbourhood capacity building and the requirement placed on grassroots organisations to collaborate.
Lisbon’s CCLD approach has benefited from strong political support. During the City Lab session, Deputy Paula Marquez spoke about the importance of neighbourhood approaches and that fact that “Cities must face global threats with local strategies.” Inspirational leadership has also been a catalytic factor behind the experiments in civic participation undertaken in Gdansk, Poland, another prominent City Lab contributor.
The death of Pawel Adamowicz in early 2019 is a huge loss to Europe’s urban policy community. At such times we seek small consolations, and one of these is the legacy of his commitment to involving citizens in Gdansk’s decision-making processes. We cannot speak about participation without talking about power. Here in Gdansk we saw a Mayor elected three times, pushing for this kind of change from the very top – mindful of the long shadow of mistrust between citizens and the state, after years of Communist rule.
The city authority’s experience in supporting civic participation has included place-making projects like the Coal Market, where citizens took charge of the reuse of a high profile public space. But it was Gdansk’s response to the 2016 floods that moved it towards more systemic deliberative processes, such as the design and implementation of Citizens Assemblies. Through this, they have learned to focus these processes on specific problems, with key lessons along the way. One of these, described during the City Lab sessions was that “the narrower the topic, the better the recommendations”.
And so to Madrid, that in the spring of 2019 is organising its own version of the Citizen Assembly – labelled a Citizens Observatory – widening its repertoire of participatory tools. Following the lead of cities like Adelaide and Toronto, Madrid is utilizing a sortation model to create a representative panel of 49 citizens to act as a sounding board on city policies. The City Authority has been at pains to ensure that its composition reflects that of the city population, for example by making sure that there are more women than men on board.
Madrid’s plans to establish a Citizens’ Observatory are on the back of the success of Decide Madrid. This evolved from the new administration’s commitment to widening the civic participation process. From a single initiative focused on the redesign of a city square, it has grown into a major crowdsourcing platform. More than 20 000 proposals have been submitted by citizens via the portal, which commits the city to implementing those receiving enough backing from citizens. Voting is a mix of postal and digital platform, with over 200 projects funded to date through a budget of EUR 100 million.
Participation – the next steps
Our cities face increasingly complex wicked problems. At a time when we also see growing levels of polarization amongst citizens, new tools are needed to find solutions and to repurpose our democracies.
The city level provides an ideal platform to try and test these new solutions. However, many cities still lack the knowledge and capacity to follow the lead of the ones we showcase here. Supporting them to do this will be important, if the European Commission’s commitment to bring Europe closer to its citizens is to succeed.
URBACT has a role to play in this. The programme’s mandate to involve all relevant stakeholders in this urban development process reflects its connection to the Leipzig Charter principle of participation. The Madrid event in April forms part of that work, and it will be followed by other interventions in the coming months. We hope to see you there.
Right before the start of this year’s URBACT City Festival in Lisbon I found myself sitting at the waterfront at Praça do Comércio, enjoying the atmosphere with people and boats passing by. Later, I discovered this beautiful area around Largo Corpo Santo and Porta do Mar, just a few minutes walk from Praça do Comércio, too. I was surprised to learn during the festival workshops that just a few years ago, my perception of Lisbon’s urban spaces would have been very different. Where people now meet and linger, cars were parked – far from creating a charming atmosphere! So, what happened over the years? asks Claus Kollinger
Planning for people and not for vehicles – how urban mobility becomes an integrated part of our city development
Lisbon (PT) is seeing a paradigm shift in urban space use. Public space is no longer seen as an asset for car traffic on a large scale. Instead, it is dedicated to a multitude of use embracing transport with more sustainable mobility options.
“Cars evaporate” is what Prof. Tiago Farias told us at the City Festival workshop dedicated to urban mobility planning. Lisbon’s recent and longer term experience prove him right. And, Lisbon is not alone in its endeavour to take traffic out of the urban space to create a more liveable city. More and more cities in Europe are turning their transport planning approach on its head – abandoning the idea of providing space to growing traffic volumes in favour of putting the actual city’s and citizens’ needs at the centre of development.
Planning for people and with people
The idea of putting people at the centre of urban mobility planning emerged with the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) concept over the last ten years across Europe. Now, it is a success story thanks to an integrated planning approach to urban mobility development. The SUMP concept innovates transport planning in a range of areas, like putting emphasis on accessibility for all, quality of life and supporting cleaner transport options. They place mobility in the frame of the city ‘s very fabric, cooperating with diverse sectors and within overall development goals. They do not stop at city limits but consider commuting in and out too. They cater for goods and people’s movement employing all available transport services. But most of all, they apply an integrated planning approach involving citizens and all concerned stakeholders to truly plan for people with people.
SUMPS mean a giant leap in transport planning. While transport planning focused on providing space for the emergence of cars during the last century and then saw the re-emergence of public transport and cycling, SUMPs now seek to answer the needs of a complex dynamic of societal, economic and technological changes cities are facing thanks to a well-structured planning process. They identify the current state of play connected to existing challenges, looking at future development pathways to create a development vision and select fitting priorities and actions to this vision. The plan details resources, responsibilities, timelines as well as monitoring and evaluating schemes. SUMPs are the blueprint of a comprehensive policy for urban mobility development. But as is often the case, the step from theory to practice is the hardest one, how do we match the SUMP idea with life in cities?
Many roads lead to Rome
This challenge was at the heart of URBACT’s CityMobilNet network. Facing 11 different locations, conditions and development histories, it quickly became clear that there is no “one-fits-all” solution at hand. The diversity ranged from small cities of 15.000 inhabitants to larger metropolis of more than half a million, from experienced SUMP practitioners to complete newcomers, from mobility cultures valuing public transport to cycling or walking dominated cities - as well as centralised planning traditions to participation practitioners... The network partners needed to apply solutions tailored to their local conditions for their SUMP development.
Where to start?
Identifying the right problem turned out to be crucial. The City of Slatina (RO) worked with the interlinkage of effects and causes and involved the entire URBACT Local Group: 97 people from public officials, security services, educational representatives, NGOs, local and international businesses and the media. The novelty was in quality and quantity of the community point of view received and integrated to the problem description. For Slatina, working methodologically at identifying the city’s problem jointly with the city society proved a new and positive experience.
The Greek city of Agii Anargyri & Kamatero (GR) took another road by approaching the problems and challenges from the view of children and families. The local team went back to school and talked with pupils, teachers and parents to identify their mobility related needs and challenges. Starting with schools, they could map the requirements to accommodate the mobility needs of local families.
The town of Morne-a-l’Eau (FR) again based the start of their SUMP development on well-existing resources: work groups, objectives and knowledge out of the Local Agenda 21 process, especially in relation to the town’s plan for its eco-quartier. Taken from there, the necessities to develop a sustainable urban mobility scheme for Morne-a-l’Eau were developed jointly with the local stakeholders and citizens.
Going step by step or taking it all at once?
The actual planning process took different formats in the network cities, too. In Gdansk (PO), the technical topics of urban mobility were processed one by one, starting with the most eminent challenge of parking space management and then continuing to public transport, cycling and other areas of urban mobility. The local CityMobilNet partner employed a large set of workshops for this step-by-step approach always involving a core group to all topics and extending it to interested persons and concerned stakeholders. Political buy-in was taken care of by presenting to the group of Vice Mayors and thorough citizen involvement by going to the city districts focussing on people’s needs and concerns there.
The City of Bielefeld (DE) contrasts to Gdansk by taking a global view of planning urban mobility. Here, a careful analysis of the entire mobility network and services was put in place including a
survey on current mobility choices and behaviour used to create a detailed picture ranging from city-wide to single locality challenges. The Bielefeld URBACT Local Group elaborated the global vision and six priorities out of this covering all aspects of relevance to Bielefeld’s urban mobility development. The policy field cross-connecting nature of a SUMP is clearly visible by the choice in priorities: “liveable city and road space”. Bielefeld continued its global approach by applying a “Future Workshop” to establish actions and measure packages to the vision and priorities: stakeholders from Bielefeld, but as well outside the area worked with maps, statistics and the pre-work results gathering knowledge as well as the opinions of cyclists, automobile-federations, public transport bodies, teachers, doctors and police personnel. Another speciality of Bielefeld’s comprehensive planning process was to continuously include all political parties present in the city council on the progress and the next steps of the planning process.
Bottom-up and “top-down”?
Does size matter? The clear answer from the CityMobilNet network is “yes”, since it directly impacts conditions and opportunities at hand. The Metropole Aix Marseille Provence (FR) had the task of breaking down its regional sustainable mobility strategy – the regional SUMP – detailing the local level. Acting as the responsible planning and implementation entity for the mobility development in their area, the Metropole employed local knowledge and needs of Cassis, La Ciotat and Ceyreste to design the future urban mobility network and services in these municipalities. They needed to align the regional objectives to the diverse local conditions of a tourist destination, a former shipyard town and a residential dominated community. Local knowledge and positions were key to come up with fitting measures for the areas by the supra-local administration of a Metropole.
The South East Region of Malta (MA) used a very much “bottom-up” approach for its planning process including direct talks with citizens and stakeholders of the many local regional councils to establish the picture of mobility development needs. Engaged local politicians employed their local networks to virtually include all interested persons in problem analysis and solution development. It is best to talk to people directly to learn what they need and then think about it, is what local politicians like Lawrance Attard stressed. This open-minded policy of citizen participation works by keeping council meetings public – by physical presence or online streaming.
Don’t be afraid to go your own way
Applying the SUMP concept and process is very much worthwhile for any town and city. But, towns and cities have different local backgrounds and capacities and might not be used to run a complex integrated planning process. Here are some tips for the journey ahead:
Make it fit
Don’t be afraid to tailor the concept and process to your local conditions. The product of the planning process needs to suit your city development. Stick to the SUMP concept and process, but not at any cost.
Take care and time to identify the problems at hand as done by Slatina involving stakeholders and citizens on assessing problems, causes and effects.
Communicate with stakeholders
Take care of participation and be clear on which role stakeholders and citizens should take in your case. Should they be sources of ideas, concerns and opinions? Or advisors? Or decision makers having a say? They are clearly a valuable resource to involve but be clear in communication! Urban mobility is a complex topic with many interrelations and specialist knowledge at hand. Stakeholders and citizen need to understand what they are discussing and working on.
