Supporting Urban Youth Through Social Innovation

Challenges and opportunities

The Cities of Tomorrow report (European Commission, DG Regional Policy 2011) underlines the challenges Europe’s cities face in integrating their young people.  

According to Eddy Adams and Robert Arnkil "The jobs crisis is an important aspect of this, but not the whole story. Significant proportions of Europe's youth were 'NEET' – not in education, employment or training – even before the current financial and economic crisis, while many of the 2011 London rioters were in work. Lying behind the talk of a new 'precariat', who are rootless and economically vulnerable, is the risk of creating an alienated and disconnected section of society which does not share mainstream values."
With diminishing resources, how can we address this problem, and support the concept of the cohesive European city? It is said in the URBACT report that an important part of the solution to the youth crisis is the transformation of public services. Authors argue that local authorities have a vital role to play here for two reasons: first, the crisis has exposed the limits of their power; and second, as the tier of government closest to communities, they can mobilise stakeholders and rebuild trust with citizens.
 

The conditions for promoting social innovation

Although the term 'social innovation' is new, the concept is not. Eddy Adams and Robert Arnkil explain in the report that across Europe, cities are using techniques like coproduction, new ideas generation and smart finance to tackle chronic social problems. "Our work identifies the conditions that stimulate social innovation and the behaviours which can nurture it" they say.

• New ideas generation

Enlightened municipalities start with the assumption that "we don't know everything'. Inverting the mantra that professionals know best, they see particular value in engaging front-line staff and customers in what Mindlab calls ideation. Building trust with these stakeholders is key. Contributions to this work from Barcelona, Nantes and Swindon show the importance of leaders in encouraging and resourcing fresh thinking.

• Access to specialist knowledge/unusual suspects

Different perspectives add value. The cities involved demonstrate the importance of bringing new insights to old problems. Berlin, Riga and Copenhagen all show how non-traditional actors – "unusual suspects" – can help find solutions through their detailed understanding of customers' lives. The Copenhagen Jobcentre collaboration with anthropologists underlines how listening to customers can lead to relatively small adjustments and clear results.

• New evidence base

Swindon re-engineered its family services based on fresh evidence. This showed that they were spending up to €300,000 on some families, yet generating no impact. Both the front-line staff and the families felt disempowered by the model. This shows the importance of asking the right questions, focusing on the key data and knowing how to use the evidence effectively.

• Coproduction

Social innovation is about mobilising all stakeholders to improve service design and delivery to get better results. Coproduction is key to this, but it doesn’t just happen. Cities like Rotterdam have evolved fresh and exciting ways to engage stakeholders – particularly young people – through platforms like the URBACT My Generation Thematic Network.

• New service delivery models

Public services can struggle to engage with disconnected citizens. Rebuilding trust is an important factor in promoting social innovation. Social economy organisations can assume a key role here, as they did in Swindon (UK), where Participle embedded personnel on a housing estate to build strong relationships with troubled families. This provided the foundations for an innovative service, where the authority was one of the providing partners.

• Smart finance

Behaviour follows funding. Around the youth issue, there is a clear need for total resource mobilisation. City witnesses spoke of the need to overcome rigid silo structures to enable funds to be targeted better and used more flexibly. Sophisticated commissioning is required to obtain appropriate services and, like Nantes, cities can use their bargaining power to shape procurement practice.

A social innovation ecosystem

Eddy Adams and Robert Arnkil explain "At the very point when we need inspiration and fresh thinking, the crisis has triggered a climate of risk-aversion and conservatism. It takes a brave and visionary leader to espouse innovation now, as we have underlined. It also requires leaders who participate, inspire and 'walk the talk'. Looking ahead, success requires a shift from random innovation to a conscious and systemic approach to public sector renewal. This poses questions around how the public sector nurtures, develops, and implements new services. It will require better evidence and a willingness to take tough decisions based on robust evidence. It will also need an altered mindset towards risk. More experimentation inevitably means a higher rate of failure than the public sector is comfortable with. This will mean developing spaces and processes which allow us to nurture new ideas, prototype on a modest scale, evaluate, then scale up where appropriate. The Young Foundation’s Social Innovation Spiral illustrates the key stages in this process, which is characterised by experimentation, testing and continual learning loops."

"The goal is systemic change, leading to better services, improved outcomes and higher returns on public sector investment. However, scaling is less likely to be about replicating multiple instances of good practice, and more about building local capacity and processes for learning and continuous improvement."
 

What cities can do 

According to the authors "City managers and elected officials are the primary audience for this work. Caught in the headlights of the crisis, they may feel that cities can do little, but that is not the case. Although public funds are under pressure, they still make up between 40% and 50% of national GDP. Municipalities, as the most local form of government, have a legitimate role in using these resources to address our most pressing issues, like youth disaffection."
"But they must make better use of existing funds, taking on the structures that cause inefficiency and waste. Cities need new ways of supporting the most disadvantaged young people. It was Einstein who defined insanity as continuously doing the same thing and expecting different results. The status quo is not an option. Again, we return to leadership. There is an opportunity here for municipalities to reinvent themselves, to morph into network enablers and facilitators of innovation. This will require new attitudes, new skills and changed behaviours. In uncertain times this may be a scary prospect. But the prize is great, and the timing opportune."

It is said in the paper that "to assist, the EU Structural Funds (ESF and ERDF) will specifically support social innovation in the new programmes. This is in addition to existing EU resources and future opportunities like Horizon 2020, which will also fund social innovation. It is down to cities to make their case for their share of these resources in order to promote social innovation."

And to conclude "This paper, together with URBACT's capacity building measures, aims to assist Europe's cities in this process."
Read more:

• Download URBACT II Capitalisation: Cities of Tomorrow, Action Today - Supporting urban youth through social innovation (1.47 MB) - PDF
• Series of URBACT thematic reports "Cities of Tomorrow: Action Today" - URBACT Website