What's new

Cities using their purchasing power to facilitate social innovation

Some cities are developing new approaches to ensure that resources are available to experiment with new solutions to their problems. They are using their buying power to orientate, speed up, amplify and sometimes systematise the development of these social innovations. The experiments show that social innovation is not only for wealthy communities, which can free up the necessary time, financial resources, human resources and interest, but is accessible to all cities that want to take risks and experiment.

Roma Community Building through Gardening

URBACT Expert, Bela Kezy, reports from Hungary on an effective way to work with Roma communities

The distribution of firewood and used clothes was a big event in Huszártelep, segregated neighbourhood, home of 1800 Roma people in Nyíregyháza, North-Eastern Hungary. Families lined up at the gate of the schoolyard. People waited patiently and chatted with each other. Rumour was, that the firewood was a present from the company doing the reconstruction of the buildings and from the director of the local school.

Everybody arrived well-prepared: they knew they needed means of transport – but not what one may expect. Actually, the area in front of the schoolyard gate looked like an exhibition of vintage strollers – representatives of different models from the past 30 years were all showcased. None of them carried babies this time, however; their duty was to transport the firewood to the homes of the people.

Preserve, Contain, Improve: Towards Integrative Policies For Urban Growth Management

The consequences of the unleashed urbanization process before the real estate crisis are today very explicit on the building stock as well as on the spatial configuration of cities. As for the building stock, the number of vacant dwellings in Spain, for instance, amounts to a total of 3.443.365, as recorded in the 2014 census. Besides that, uncountable extensions of already urbanized but not built neighborhoods are filling the outskirts of our cities.

Functional territories for better integrated governance: Towards spatially coordinated development in metropolitan and urban-rural area

The growing territorial mismatch (between the administrative and the real-life boundaries of urban areas) and the conflicting relationship between urban and rural territories within the same areas become more and more serious impediments to integrated urban development.

This short paper aims to explore existing knowledge about these problems and examples on attempts for solutions. All these should help to find out what would be the best way for URBACT to help cities to design integrated (policy crosscutting) urban development strategies for their functional areas, improving also the urban-rural links.

Post-Crisis Urban Planning: Innovative Local Solutions to Fight Environmental Degradation

Due to the financial crisis the heavily indebted public actors are not able any more to launch large-scale programmes to handle difficult environmental problems. Thus they have to find new, innovative ways, experiment with more flexible environmental standards and regulations.

View from the Top: When Women Run Cities...

In this next article in the series on gender equality and female leadership in cities we hear some personal views directly from a number of women city leaders and urban experts. The first article of this series that you can read  HERE, presented a review of data on the levels of female political representation at city level in in Europe.