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Learning about Implementation

Understand how this process can successfully take place in cities and how to tackle the challenges ahead

All networks

Resourceful Cities

RESOURCEFUL CITIES is an URBACT Action Planning Network of ten European cities. This project seeks to develop the next generation of urban resource centres, so they can serve as catalysts of the local circular economy, by adopting a participative and integrated approach. The resource centres strive to promote the positive economic, environmental and social impacts, notably for the circular economy. Thus, the network facilitates waste prevention, reuse, repair and recycling. The centres also work as connection points for citizens, new businesses, researchers and the public sector to co-create new ways to close resource loops at the local level. By bringing together interested actors to work alongside, the goal is to promote the change of values and mindset.
Ongoing

USE-IT

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.
Ongoing

AGRI-URBAN

Rethinking Agri-food production in small and medium-sized European cities is the aim of this Action Planning network. Agri-food production is a mature industry that continues to play an important role in terms of GDP, employment and environmental sustainability. That is why new growth potentials must be activated by means of innovation, new business models and strategies. Our vision is to place cities at the core of a growing global movement that recognizes the current complexity of food systems and the links between rural cities and nearby cities as a way to ensure regional development.
Closed

ALT/BAU

The ALT/BAU Transfer Network focuses on alternative strategies in central and historic districts of European cities to activate unused and decaying housing stock resulting from demographic, economic and social change. Based on the experiences from Chemnitz’ URBACT Good Practice “Housing Agency for Shrinking Cities” (Agentur StadtWohnen Chemnitz), the network transfers experiences that proved successful to proactively connect administrations, owners, investors and users to initiate sustainable and resource saving development.
Closed

BeePathNet

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-sufficiency challenges linked to urban beekeeping through integrated and participative approaches, build key stakeholders’ capacity to influence relevant policies, develop and implement efficient solutions.
Closed

BoostInno

The work developed by the cities of this Action Planning network has proven that social innovation is not just a trend, but it could also be qualified as a fundamental change in the management of cities, in the management of impact and in the relations cities uphold and develop with their inhabitants. Some would describe this change as an equivalent of the industrial or the IT revolution: up until now, one of the basic assumptions of urban policy was that citizens were to accept what is decided, planned and built. Recent years have shown that it is often the citizens who make the city, in a collaborative perspective.
Closed

C-CHANGE

Transfer the work of Manchester Arts Sustainability Team (MAST) to support cities to mobilise their arts and culture sectors to contribute towards local climate change action is the aim of the C-CHANGE network. This can be done by: 1) Developing local policies, governance and capacity to act 2) Developing plans to reduce CO2 emissions and/or adapt to climate change, and supporting implementation 3) Developing plans to use arts and culture to engage citizens to act, and supporting implementation 4) Encouraging replication in other cities.
Closed

CARD4ALL

CARD4ALL is a Transfer network focused on the implementation of innovative services and technologies through a Citizen Card System. Cities can gather information to improve their services and use it for participative processes. It can be applied to promote social inclusion, local trade, urban mobility and sustainable living, thus creating a Smart City with Smart Citizens. The technology used allows the transferability and replication in different contexts.
Closed

CHANGE!

In times when personal sacrifices are much needed to tackle burning societal issues, fostering and enabling collaboration at local level of public administration is of the utmost importance. The partners of this Action Planning network had the opportunity to reflect upon social design, a process to think over alongside local stakeholders how to co-design their social public services towards a more collaborative service. This means to create an urban strategy that somehow engages volunteers to improve communities and public services, reducing costs at the same time.
Closed

Cities4CSR

The project’s main aim is to unlock opportunities in order to improve our cities. The Action Planning Network of CITIES4CSR has identified in Corporate Social Responsibility actions the opportunities to unlock and improve municipal strategies and local plans, discovering and exploiting the value of partnerships with the private sector and relevant stakeholders at local level. Co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund, CITIES4CSR network involves ten European cities throughout Europe, each of them focusing its activity on specific local challenge and theme of CSR, according to local needs and municipal priorities. At the same time, at network level, the project provides a valuable opportunity of good practices sharing on CSR actions and experiences carried out locally by cities, reaching a common understanding of the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility for municipal development and the improvement of local policies.
Closed

Civic eState

The Civic eState network worked on new models of urban co-governance based on the commons. Two years of EU cooperation for promoting urban co-governance and experimenting public-community partnerships to enable inhabitants and local communities constitutional rights to self-organize and collectively act for the urban commons. The network outputs aim at guaranteeing the collective enjoyment as well as collective management of urban essential facilities, to secure fair and open access, participatory decision-making, sustainability and preservation for the benefit of future generations.
Closed

Innovato-R

The Innovato-R Transfer network builds upon the Innova.TO project, which is a competition open to Municipality employees aimed at developing innovative projects improving the Administration performances, reducing wastes and/or valuing resources. Proposals can be focused on service quality, goods/services acquisition, costs rationalization, energetic optimization, bureaucratic impact reduction and increase in data and in digital tools management.
Closed

INT-HERIT

The INT-HERIT implementation network brings together 9 European cities facing challenges related to the revitalisation of their cultural heritage. These cities learn from each other and help each other to develop local strategies in order to make their cities an attractive place to live, work and visit. The network focuses on the implementation of innovative models through integrated and sustainable local strategies. It will increase awareness of strategies and plans, improving the capacity of cities to manage their heritage and enable their social and economic development.
Closed

Playful Paradigm

Cities offer unique opportunities for addressing the challenges of urbanization, ageing, climate change, social exclusion, only if enabling, enjoyable places are co-created. This Transfer network aims to replicate the “playful paradigm” based on gamification as an innovative concept for promoting social inclusion, healthy lifestyles & energy awareness, intergenerational & cultural mediation, place-making & economic prosperity. Games offer new strategies for engaging city stakeholders in urban development.
Closed

Procure

The goal of this Action Planning network was to explore how to harness the spending power through procurement of public and anchor institutions in the partner cities to bring about economic, social and environmental benefits for businesses and people which in turn will have a positive impact on the city and its local economy. The topics to be explored include: the regulations and law at both European and national level, and what cities are able to do around innovative procurement; how to analyse procurement spend and develop a procurement strategy; the use of social criteria and environmental criteria in procurement; and how to raise awareness of procurement amongst local businesses and SMEs.
Closed

Re-growCity

Re-growCity Transfer network focuses on the development of interventions that built on local capabilities to arrest and reverse long term social, economic and environmental decline. Altena has a track record of recognised good practices that facilitate the development of sustainable initiatives with a minimum of external resource input. This network will support partners to revitalise public services and the economy, regenerate the urban fabric and develop civil society in a context of long term decline.
Closed

REFILL

In many European cities one of the positive side effects of the financial-economic crisis is the growth of innovative forms of solidarity and commitment at local level. This Action Planning network pioneered, in terms of bottom-up civic initiatives, by co-creating solutions for social challenges in an urban context. Cities are often perceived as a laboratory and governments are no longer the only actor to solve complex challenges faced in cities. Therefore, temporary use is a powerful tool to make our cities "future fit". Since the concept of temporary use is interacting with many other urban dynamics it creates the right environment for social innovation to develop by: exchanging and evaluating of local supporting instruments; ensuring long lasting effects of temporality; building a more flexible and collaborative public administration.
Closed

RESILIENT EUROPE

Becoming more resilient means that a city strives to enhance its ability to bounce back and grow even stronger and better in the face of the chronic stresses and acute shocks. As such, city resilience is a continuous challenge for individuals, communities, institutions, businesses and infrastructure systems to address current trends and future transitions. This Action Planning network looked at the challenges of achieving resilience in and of our cities in a comprehensive and holistic way, by applying the lessons from the innovative governance approach of Transition Management. This approach is a process-oriented and participatory steering that enables social learning through iterations between collective vision development and experimenting.
Closed

URBAN REGENERATION MIX

The Good Practice to be transferred through the URBAN REGENERATION MIX Transfer network is a collaborative city model that increases the participation of city residents, promotes their equal involvement and strengthens relations between the main stakeholders in urban regeneration processes. The network will focus on the study, identification and application of key success factors that bring back life to degraded urban areas and help to realise the potential of their inhabitants.
Closed

URBinclusion

Socioeconomic disparities and other forms of inequalities are a major issue in European cities which are threatened by social polarisation increase. Poverty does not only create social differences between people and groups; it also leads to spatial differences. URBinclusion implementation network focused on the co-creation of new solutions to reduce poverty in deprived urban areas, focusing on some key challenges to be tackled when going from the strategic to the implementation dimension: integrated approach and inter-departmental coordination, involvement of local stakeholders, monitoring and evaluation and financial innovation. Partners cities interchange showed that this requires integrated, cyclical and monitored processes made of recursive actions and feedbacks that produces stable conditions of engagement for continuous improvement.
Closed

VITAL CITIES

Seeking answers on how to combat social exclusion through the redesign of public spaces in deprived residential areas by using the power and common language of sport, this Action Planning network found solutions through innovative urban sport actions, physical equipment and better orchestrated service delivery. Active living positively contributes to social cohesion, wellbeing and economic prosperity in cities. However, currently cities are challenged by the opposite: dramatic increase in the frequency of diseases as a result of sedentary life style and social exclusion. To tackle these challenges, European cities have invested in large scale sports facilities over the past decades. These strategies have a limited success, hence a new approach is needed: instead of ‘bringing’ the inactive citizens to the sports facilities, public space itself should be turned into a low threshold facility inviting all citizens to physical activity.
Closed

EUniverCities

Improve the university-city nexus. By applying to the URBACT programme, they want to learn from each other's experiences and practices, and move forward as successful and inclusive knowledge cities to realise Europe's 2020 strategy.
Closed

Genius: Open

Our project will transfer a leading edge Open Innovation approach where citizens and businesses work together with the city, creating innovative solutions to city challenges via an online collaboration platform; GeniUS! 
Closed