Carlos

Mascarell Vilar

Carlos

Ad-Hoc Expert

Generic Skills

B.1. Understanding of integrated and sustainable urban development:

I understand urban integrated development as an approach to experiment with new solutions and best practices, scale them up so that they can be adapted to other contexts and reinforce an integrated approach in order to strengthen resilience at the local level by focusing in the following principles: • People-centred approach: citizens’ well-being at the heart of policy setting; • Resilience: adapted to each city’s/country and cultural idiosyncrasy, socioeconomic context, environmental setting and overall sustainability; • Techno-culture and digitalisation: technology as a means to improve citizens’ well-being; • Quadruple helix: integration and engagement of stakeholders through public and private partnerships (citizens, government, private sector, academia); • Trust-building: as a result of stakeholder collaboration, and consolidation of social capital; • Experiential learning: benchmarking best and worst practices, monitoring and evaluating policies and sharing knowledge (intra-city, intra-country and international cooperation); • Brand identity & reputation: solutions that suit citizens’ culture, building a brand. There are still many governance-related barriers that need also to be addressed in order to be able to find the right thematic solutions: lack of coordination and funding, duplicity of competences, lack of human capacities in middle-sized cities are only some of the challenges that integrated urban development also needs to address.

B.2. Understanding of exchange and learning processes at transnational level:

The main objective of exchanges and learning processes at the international level is to ensure not only that cities can learn from good practices coming from other places, but that they can also learn how to adapt them to their own context, as well as how to develop their own action plan. In addition, the objective of exchanging is also to strengthen capacities about existing methodologies (such as city- mentoring) of exchange so that they can use them in the future by themselves. Knowledge exchange activities aim at finding evidence about the most suitable policies at the city level, in order to influence decision-making at the local, national and international levels. A methodology of exchange needs to be SMART as well as specific and local: It supports partner cities in carrying out concrete changes in local practice, where goals and standards are set by a benchmark based on EU-wide experience, and each city undertaking these actions is mentored through the process of change by a mentor city. General and EU-wide: By applying its thematic benchmarks in these ‘real-life’ city actions, the method develops, tests and validates them so they can be delivered to Europe’s cities and other levels of government as tools for improving practice EU-wide in future years Experimenting at the local level, transferring the good examples to other places, while assessing their needs and particular context and scaling-them up through good dissemination are the key for success

B.3. Proficiency in English:

Since I finished university I have been always working in English. Since I started to work at the European Parliament in 2010, I have always worked in English (as well as in Spanish, French and Italian mainly), which has allowed me to consolidate my capacity to communicate in English both written and orally. Since my first professional experience in the European Parliament and after at the UNIDIR, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and CEMR, I have been writing briefings, position papers, press releases, as well as responding to consultations, etc. I have also facilitated several expert groups and participated in dozens of workshops and seminars, as a speaker and as a participant. More concretely I have represented the organisations I have worked for in expert groups, conferences and seminars both as a speaker and as moderator. I have also written several working papers, position papers, reports, evaluations or event reports. I am also used to write amendments and to read reports, papers and legislative documents in English. I am proficient both in writing and oral English, while I also have a very good command of French, Italian, Spanish and Catalan, while I also have intermediate knowledge of Portuguese.

Expertise for the design and delivery of transnational exchange and learning activities:

Thematic expertise:

Theme / Policy:

Local Governance

Theme / Policy:

Active Inclusion of Target Groups

Expertise support to local authorities and other stakeholders in designing & delivering integrated and participatory policies

E.1. Knowledge on participatory methods and tools for co-production and implementation of local polices :

City-mentroing aims at promoting mutual-learning between more and less experienced cities and associations of local and regional government. The initiative aims to do this by a peer-to-peer learning method. Its strength lies in the interaction between two levels: • Specific and local: It supports partner cities in carrying out concrete changes in local practice, where goals and standards are set by a benchmark based on global experience, and each city undertaking these actions is mentored through the process of change by a mentor city. • Global and EU-wide: By applying its thematic benchmarks in these ‘real-life’ city actions, the initiative develops, tests and validates them so they can be delivered to other cities around the world as tools for improving practice EU-wide in future years. The methodology will help mentee cities (learning cities) to identify key actors and factors that need to be in place to accomplish the reference benchmark (after the definition of standards) as well as how to use it; steps to take before the visit; the mentoring visit itself (including the task of drafting an action plan); implementing the action plan and evaluating it. The benchmarks (to and key factors for each topic will be drawn from a global-wide review of cities’ experience polled by associations’ knowledge. Local clusters of interest parties participate in the three-phases: needs assessment, action planning and implementation.

E.2. Knowledge on integrated approach for the design, delivering, monitoring and evaluation of urban strategies/policies:

As part of the CEMR team I have contributed to develop the Reference Framework for Sustainable Cities (RFSC) is an online toolkit (www.rfsc.eu) for local European authorities that are involved in or are willing to start a process of integrated and sustainable urban development. The main objective of the toolkit is to enhance the dialogue within a city and with peer cities tackling the same issues all across Europe. Based on a checklist of 25 questions and a large database of indicators, the toolkit offers practical support to: Develop an urban strategy or project which takes into account all fields of sustainable urban development; • Check the ongoing strategies or projects in a given city and inform about the interactions (positive or negative) of the different policy sectors; • Monitor the progress of a strategy over a certain period of time. Moreover, the toolkit offers access to different forms of exchange and support (training sessions, peer learning with other cities, showcase catalogue). The toolkit was designed by and for cities, and can be used at various scales - from the neighbourhood level to the wider metropolitan level. It is free of charge and does not require any specific commitment from the cities. It is now available in 17 languages.

E.3. Awareness of the main policy and funding schemes for sustainable urban development at EU and national level:

As a staff member of CEMR, I have a very close relationship to other colleagues who work in the field of urban sustainable development (Reference Framework for Sustainable Cities, URBACT, Eurocities, ICLEI, CPMR, AER, etc.) and I have also very good connections with other platforms such as 100 Resilient Cities or Cities Alliance. In addition, I am in close contact with the Directorates Generals and Agencies as well as different programmes of the European Commission related to sustainable urban development. In this respect, my day to day work in the field of urban development at the policy, projects and knowledge exchange levels, allows me to keep track of trends in sustainable development, funding opportunities, etc. I am familiar with the work of Interreg, URBACT, the Urban Innovative Actions, etc. In addition, I am also following the evolution of cohesion policy and rural development, while as a member of the Urban Agenda for the EU (Partnership on refugees and migrants), I follow the developments in the different Partnerships. From time to time I write articles on urban development for newspapers such as El País or eldiario.es and I am very active in twitter, which allows me to follow very interesting organisations, persons and initiatives working on urban development. And it also allows me to be updated on the most recent trends linked to sustainable urban development thanks to urban-based think tanks, blogs and other sources of information.

E.4. Ability to understand specific local situations and adapt tools and content to different local realities:

The mentoring-scheme methodology I used in twinning, allows to adapt assess the context of cities participating in the process by assessing very accurately the needs as well as the context in close cooperation with a local cluster of local actors. The accompanying city facilitates the process. In this respect, I have launched the Platform of Young local elected representatives to contribute to the establishment of 100% Youth Cities through city-to-city cooperation. The methodology behinf allows to understand the contextual factors that might be blocking the achievement of a particular objective and that might not be linked to the policy itself. Puting a particular challenge versus a reference benchmark in close cooperation with city officials and a cluster of local stakeholders allows to adapt an action plan to a particular context. The metodology aims at promoting mutual-learning between more and less experienced cities. Its strength lies in the interaction between two levels: • Specific and local: It supports partner cities in carrying out concrete changes in local practice, where goals and standards are set by a benchmark based on global experience, and each city undertaking these actions is mentored through the process of change by a mentor city. • Global and EU-wide: By applying its thematic benchmarks in these ‘real-life’ city actions, the initiative develops, tests and validates them so they can be delivered to other cities around the world.

Summary Expertise:

Experienced in using methodologies of mentoring-scheme learning between more and less experienced cities in order to elaborate action plans to improve policy outcomes with respect to a reference benchmark identified through the different thematic URBACT networks: from the needs assessment phase (identification of gaps with respect to a reference benchmark) to the benchmarking, action plan definition and the implementation and evaluation phases. Together with my knowledge in building mentoring-schemes for knowledge exchange, the following 7 principles guide the way I support to local authorities and other stakeholders in designing and delivering integrated and participatory policies: • People-centered approach: citizens’ well-being at the heart of policy setting; • Resilience: adapted to each city’s/country and cultural idiosyncrasy, socioeconomic context, environmental setting and overall sustainability; • Techno-culture: technology as a means to improve citizens’ well-being; • Quadruple helix: integration and engagement of stakeholders through public and private partnerships (citizens, government, private sector, academia); • Trust-building: as a result of stakeholder collaboration, and consolidation of social capital; • Experiential learning: benchmarking best and worst practices, monitoring and evaluating policies (intra-city, intra-country and international cooperation); • Brand identity & reputation: solutions that suit citizens’ culture