All networks

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.