Introduction

“This report highlights the conversations that took place during the Innovative City Development meeting, which was held in Madrid in March 2017. The meeting brought together a small group of innovative city makers – including researchers, activists, experts and city officials who are taking a progressive approach to cultural issues, social innovation, urban development and participatory governance processes with city governments.

The meeting was hosted by the City of Madrid, the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) and the Connected Action for the Commons network during the ECF-initiated Idea Camp 2017 – which brought 50 cultural change-makers to Madrid over the same few days in March.

As well as reporting back on what was discussed at the Innovative City Development meeting,this report also includes three case studies that illustrate some of the issues raised and finishes by drawing together some ideas (which can be found from page 11 onwards)that we hope will help to advise city makers and people who care about the future of their cities.

The report was written and compiled by with advice and contributions from Christian Iaione, Katarina Pavić and Igor Stokfiszewski. It reflects the conversations of the Innovative City Development meeting.”

Excerpts

The design of the meeting

“The start of the meeting looked a little like an upgraded ‘show and tell’ session. Each city maker was invited to deliver a four-minute presentation on a challenge they are working on in their own city, focusing on concrete issues in their own communities. This was followed by facilitated discussions in smaller groups looking at shared challenges and possible solutions for collaborative city change-making. The aim was to find practices that can encourage community and institutional participatory city-making processes.”

Three case studies

“From these presentations, we have chosen three case studies that highlight different problems within cities that can be applied to other regions across Europe and indeed around the world. These three case studies represent the diversity of issues and geographical areas in Europe where citizen participation and commoning practices are already making a difference.”

Conclusions – next steps

“Urban co-governance or urban commons participatory governance, as well as city making, are increasingly becoming the answer to the demands of city residents who want to democratise their cities and city governance. These approaches can help reduce the tensions of those living in a city by coalescing different people or actors around a shared common goal. They can also be a key contributor to social innovation.

The statements and questions that arose out of the Innovative City Development meeting need to be developed further, both within the institutional work setting and with city makers outside the work setting, in a peer-to-peer context.

Some of the outcomes from the meeting can already be taken forward and applied as a pilot experience or can help to develop or scale up an existing scheme. Making a series of models that can be used flexibly within different contexts and by different people that consider sustainability, legality and financial roles, is a move towards greater equality for our societies.

The responsibility for the safeguarding and upkeep of a public collective needs defining and may need experts to create a flexible but clear charter. Creating a collective that is able to function with clear information management and distribution to communities is important to make informed civic decision-making possible.

Institutions need to decide what is a public good, what is the definition of a private thing and public interest and be clear about how participation helps its operation. With this information and transparency, decisions such as how and who should manage the redistribution of resources can be clarified to all stakeholders.

Building trust between all stakeholders is a continuous process. The need to balance the welcoming of new and different voices to its operation, such as transient communities, could help that process rather than derail it.

Keeping the door open to experimentation – for example, with shadow economies and applying collaborative methodology learning in education – could lead to further impact and also help to create a similar language to explain value. This may also translate into recognising different values – such as cultural, faith and freedom of speech – which will have a lasting impact on social cohesion and the well-being of societies in general.”

The full report is available here.

Photo by EJP Photo

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This is an excerpt from the upcoming book Funding the Cooperative City: Community finance and the economy of civic spaces.

In the past decade, with the economic crisis and the transformation of welfare societies, NGOs, community organisations and civic developers – City Makers – established some of the most important services and spaces in formerly vacant buildings, underused areas and neglected neighbourhoods. Consolidating their presence in the regenerated spaces, these initiatives are increasingly looking into the power of the local community, the dispersed crowd and new financial actors to invest in their activities.

Two years ago, the cultural centre La Casa Invisible collected over 20.000 euros for the partial renovation of the building including the installation of fire doors and electric equipments to assure the safety of their revitalized 19th century building in the centre of Málaga. A few months later, East London’s Shuffle Festival, operating in a cemetery park at Mile End, collected 60.000 pounds for the renovation and community use of The Lodge, an abandoned building at the corner of the cemetery. In order to implement their campaigns, both initiatives used the online platforms Goteo and Spacehive that specialise in the financing of specific community projects. The fact that many of the hundreds of projects supported by civic crowdfunding platforms are community spaces, underlines two phenomena: the void left behind by a state that gradually withdrew from certain community services, and the urban impact of community capital created through the aggregation of individual resources.

The question if community capital can really cure the voids left behind by the welfare state has generated fierce debates in the past years. This discussion was partly launched by Brickstarter, the beta platform specialised in architectural crowdfunding, when it introduced to the public the idea of crowdfunded urban infrastructures. Those who opposed Brickstarter, did in fact protest against the Conservative agenda of the “Big Society”, the downsizing of welfare society and the “double taxation” of citizens: “Why should we spend on public services when our taxes should pay for them?”

Nevertheless, in the course of the economic crisis, many European cities witnessed the emergence of a parallel welfare infrastructure: the volunteer-run hospitals and social kitchens in Athens, the occupied schools, gyms and theatres of Rome or the community-run public squares of Madrid are only a few examples of this phenomenon. European municipalities responded to this challenge in a variety of ways. Some cities like Athens began to examine how to adjust their regulations to enable the functioning of community organisations, others created new legal frameworks to share public duties with community organisations in contractual ways, like Bologna with the Regulation of the Commons. In several other cities, administrations began experimenting with crowdfunding public infrastructures, like in Ghent or Rotterdam, where municipalities offer match-funding to support successful campaigns, or with participatory budgeting, like in Paris, Lisbon or Tartu. Yet other public administrations in the UK, the Netherlands or Austria invited the private sphere to invest in social services in the form of Social Impact Bonds, where the work of NGOs or social enterprises is pre-financed by private actors who are paid back with a return on their investment in case the evaluation of the delivered service is positive.

Largo Residencias, Lisbon. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Alternatively, some cities chose to support local economy and create more resilient neighbourhoods with self-sustaining social services through grant systems. The City of Lisbon, for instance, after identifying a number of “priority neighbourhoods” that need specific investments to help social inclusion and ameliorate local employment opportunities, launched the BIP/ZIP program that grants selected civic initiatives with up to 40.000 euros. The granted projects, chosen through an open call, have to prove their economic sustainability and have to spend the full amount in one year. The BIP/ZIP project, operating since 2010, gave birth to a number of self-sustaining civic initiatives, including social kitchens that offer affordable food and employment for locals or cooperative hotels that use their income from tourism to support social and cultural projects. In 2015 the experience of the BIP/ZIP matured in a Community-Led Local Development Network, as identified by the European Union’s Cohesion Policy 2014-2020, which will grant the network access to part of the Structural Funds of the City of Lisbon. The CLLD is a unique framework for the democratic distribution of public funds: it foresees the management of the funding to be shared between administration, private and civic partners, with none of them having the majority of shares and votes.

While, as the previous cases demonstrate, the public sector plays an important role in strengthening civil society in some European cities, many others witnessed the emergence of new welfare services provided by the civic economy completely outside or without any help by the public sector. In some occasions, community contribution appears in the form of philanthropist donation to support the construction, renovation or acquisition of playgrounds, parks, stores, pubs or community spaces. In others, community members act as creditors or investors in an initiative that needs capital, in exchange for interest, shares or the community ownership of local assets, for instance, shops in economically challenged neighbourhoods. Crowdfunding platforms also help coordinating these processes: the French Bulb in Town platform, specialized in community investment, gathered over 1 million euros for the construction of a small hydroelectric plant in Ariège that brings investors a return of 7% per year.

ExRotaprint, Berlin. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Besides aggregating resources from individuals to support particular cases, community infrastructure projects are also helped by ethical investors. When two artists mobilised their fellow tenants to save the listed 10.000 m2 Rotaprint in the Berlin district of Wedding, they invited several organisations working on moving properties off the speculation market and eliminating the debts attached to land, to help them buy the buildings. While the complex was bought and is renovated with the help of an affordable loan by the CoOpera pension fund, the land was bought by the Edith Maryon and Trias Foundations and is rented (with a long-term lease, a “heritable building right”) to ExRotaprint, a non-profit company, making it impossible to resell the shared property. With its sustainable cooperative ownership model, ExRotaprint provides affordable working space for manufacturers as well as social and cultural initiatives whose rents cover the loans and the land’s rental fee.

Creating community ownership over local assets and keeping profits benefit local residents and services is a crucial component of resilient neighbourhoods. Challenging the concept of value and money, many local communities began to experiment with complementary currencies like the Brixton or Bristol Pounds. Specific organisational forms like Community Land Trusts or cooperatives have been instrumental in helping residents create inclusive economic ecosystems and sustainable development models.

Homebaked, Liverpool. Photo (cc) Eutropian

In Liverpool’s Anfield neighbourhood, a community bakery is the symbol of economic empowerment: renovated and run by the Homebaked Community Land Trust established in April 2012, the bakery – initially backed by the Liverpool Biennale – offers employment opportunities for locals, and it is the catalyst of local commerce and the centre of an affordable housing project that is developed in the adjacent parcels. Similarly, a few kilometres east, local residents established another CLT to save the Toxteth neighborhood from demolition. The Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust, with the help of social investors and a young collective of architects (winning the prestigious Turner prize), organised a scheme that includes affordable housing, community-run public facilities and shops.

The economic self-determination of a community has been explored at the scale of an entire neighbourhood by the Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative in Southern Rotterdam. The cooperative is an umbrella organisation that connects workspaces with shopkeepers, local makers, social foundations, and the local food market: they have developed an energy collective in cooperation with an energy supplier that realises substantial savings for businesses in the neighbourhood; a cleaning service that ensures that cleaning work is commissioned locally; and a food delivery service for elderly people in the neighbourhood.

With community organisations and City Makers acquiring significant skills to manage welfare services, urban infrastructures and inclusive urban development processes, it is time for their recognition by established actors in the public and private sectors. The EU’s Urban Agenda, developing guidelines for a more sustainable and inclusive development of European cities, can be a catalyst of this recognition: it can prompt the creation of new instruments and policies to enable such community-led initiatives. While the Cohesion Policy 2014-2020 has developed the CLLD framework, not many Member States chose to use this instrument. The Urban Agenda could therefore envision the adoption of more methods to be experimented by City Administrations, to allow for a more sustainable and inclusive allocation of resources. Whether through matchfunding, grant systems, or simply removing the legal barriers of cooperatives, land trusts and community investment, municipalities could join the civil society in developing a more resilient civic economy with accessible jobs, affordable housing, clean energy, and social integration.

Lead image from homebaked.org, Liverpool UK. All other images from Eutropian.

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How can we plan our environment openly and collaboratively? Finding an answer to this question was the main motivation for my graduation project Foundation for Transportation. It deals with a commons-based industry that is using the legacy of the former industrial revolutions to develop transportation technologies of the future. As an urban designer I was aiming to find a fitting spatial representation for this society and the work of the P2P Foundation became a valuable resource for me.

I realised however that design is not enough to create the commons. It is essential to grow a community, allow collaboration in the planning process and to negotiate the needs of the local industry. In this way the place will be designed by its identity. I did this by translating the development of open source software to cities. A digital representation of the physical world assists the planning and makes it easier for the community to review and accept new projects. But this alone does not guarantee an open process, since the planner could close of necessary parts like the shape of buildings or amount of public space. It would create a platform urbanism as a netarchical structure. Therefore to be open the planning process itself needs to become a common resource.

The result is shown in the video and for more information you can download a report. There are still many questions unanswered or arising. How should the digital planning be informed? What should it inform? How does the community interact? I am personally very interested in continuing the research and make it applicable. Through the last few years I have experimented with similar processes together with friends and we want to bring it one step ahead. If you are interested and have an advice, inquiry or want to collaborate, or you know someone with whom I should get in touch with, please feel free and contact me via [email protected].

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