Udine: Roma Integration Made Possible with URBACT

Udine (population 98,000) is a wealthy town lying in the hilly region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, north-eastern Italy.  Located about 20 km from Slovenia and 50 km from Austria, Udine is a melting pot of cultures, languages and ethnic groups. Friulan (a Rhaeto-romance language akin to Swiss Romantsh) is widely spoken in everyday life, as are German and Slovenian; it is common for locals to mix up to four languages when they speak.  To the visitors, Udine appears as a poised town, rich of its diversity and proud of its multicultural heritage. Yet, if they wandered around, a few kilometres away from the elegant medieval city centre, they would discover a different reality: Italy’s largest illegal Roma campsite.  Its dwellers live there in appalling conditions, without access to minimum safety and living standards such as running water and electricity. Life expectancy is short, illiteracy high, employment opportunities almost non-existent. Inner tensions and quarrels between rival families further exacerbate precariousness and violence in the camp and vis-à-vis the “outside world”. 

A project born during a witch-hunt against Roma people

In 2008, a nationwide clampdown on Roma was called by inconsiderate politicians. The general attitude in Italy was akin to a witch-hunt. Mayors were given extra-ordinary powers to force evictions on Roma encampments, without providing alternative solution for housing. Tensions between the Roma and gadjos (non-Roma) were exacerbating, defiance between the two parties reached a peak. Tearing the camp down was put forward by some as a drastic solution, but it was clear that without longer-term planning, such an approach was doomed to fail: new camps would pop up again in the area. In any case, Udine wanted to go another way: “Our local government was convinced that the only way forward was not eviction, but rather social inclusion” stresses Antonella Nonino, Udine’s Deputy Councillor on Roma issues, coming back on Udine’s experience in ROMA-NeT. She had been commissioned to work on Roma and design a local programme to foster Roma inclusion just a few months before the launch of the ROMA-NeT network. At a time when the Italian government was calling for strong and decisive actions to address the “Roma emergency”, Udine decided to take a closer look at experiences attempted in other EU countries to explore sustainable solutions. Even though Antonella reckons having been sceptical, at the beginning, about the benefits of taking part in a project that would finance exchange and not actions… she decided to give it a try: “We had plenty of ideas, but we did not know where to start and how to implement them. Budapest came to us at the right time when they invited us to be part of the ROMA-NeT project !”  THE EU FRAMEWORK FOR NATIONAL ROMA INTEGRATION STRATEGIES In 2011 the European Commission adopted a Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies focusing on four key areas: education, employment, healthcare and housing.The strategies presented by Member States were assessed by the EC and their implementation was doubled by the creation of national Contact Points on the topic of Roma integration. If you want to know more about the progress done so far, read the 2014 Report on the implementation of the EU framework for National Roma Integration Strategies !

Getting everyone to sit at the same table: a challenging step!

As for most URBACT partners, the first challenge for Udine was to gather the relevant stakeholders around the table to start exploring the local situation and possible ways out. When dealing with Roma issues, this step turned to be even more challenging. Associations working on the field with Roma were reluctant to take part in a project that seemed at first sight “all talk and no action”. Maria Cantarutti, volunteer at the Saint Vincenzo de Paoli Society, a local religious volunteer association, puts it this way”: “We are used to work in a continuous state of emergency with the Roma community and we struggle to deliver basic assistance. We have little time for talks so…”.  As a starting point, all organisations dealing with the Roma community were contacted and invited to meetings with the city hall. The stakeholders were very heterogeneous, ranging from public bodies (local health authorities, social services, etc.) to charities and volunteer associations. The public, private and third-sector were all represented. For many organisations, it was the first time they had the chance to talk to each other and with the municipality.   The aim of the first meetings was to establish a common vision on ROMA-NeT and to draft a baseline study of the priorities to be tackled.  The process turned out to be difficult. Each stakeholder had a different point of view on how to best serve the Roma community, a point of view which often clashed with the one of the Roma community itself.  Yet, thanks to the baseline exercise supported by the network expert, Ann Hyde, it was possible to identify and agree on 4 main priorities for the Local Support Group to focus on: access to employment; access to education; access to housing; and access to health. Of particular important was the issue of young children, experiencing high rates of early school leaving (98%, as parents take them out of school after they have learned to read, write and count), and suffering from poor health (widespread obesity, extremely low life expectancy, non-vaccinated). Last but not least, a recurrent problem kept coming on the table when doing the baseline study: the lack of trust between the Roma community and the public authorities. For the municipality, breaking off old patterns of mistrust was a priority so as to develop actions that would be in the interest of all stakeholders.  

Building trust to bridge communities and identify real needs

With the support of the network expert and the inputs and ideas provided by network partners, Udine took to the task to build a solid partnership with the Roma community. The Municipality decided the Roma should be put in the centre of the Local Support Group: their know-how and experience dealing with the different associations was needed to understand local dynamics, community needs and to develop a co-production environment in the Local Support Group. Gaining the confidence of the Roma community proved to be a difficult task: mediation was done on the field, targeting a group or family at a time and asking them about their perspective on the camp, on local policies directed at them and on their needs, hopes and desires. In this respect, ROMA-NeT was a true bottom up process, involving a lot of work on the field.  As a result, local Roma community leaders became increasingly aware that their participation in the Local Support Group could be useful and that their opinion and requests did matter. It was a major breakthrough for Udine. For stakeholders involved in the Local Support Group, this process  entailed a change in mentality about how to tackle “the Roma issue”. Right at the beginning of ROMA-NeT, they mostly shared the opinion that the best would be to equip the campsite with vans and basic commodities. However, bottom up contact revealed that this was based on a biased assumption: that is, that Roma people are fine with social segregation, and even want it. Udine’s deputy mayor, Antonella Nonino recalls: “At the beginning, we thought that a major achievement of the URBACT Local Support Group would be to convince the Roma to leave the campsite. However, we found out during our meetings that they did want to leave the camp but did not know how to handle this, how to go about it. The Local Support Group has been the bridge between 2 worlds and their prejudice”. Sharing experiences and practices with other European cities has also proved useful right from the start. Budapest’s experience with Roma proved especially inspiring. Indeed, lessons learnt from past policies highlighted that real integration takes time and that pushing too hard for integration (e.g. moving Roma families from ghettos to quality blocks of flats) was doomed to failure. Instead a gradual integration process with active, individual support and communication along the way is needed. <img data-cke-saved-src="uploads/RTEmagicC_urbact-udine2.jpg.jpg" src="uploads/RTEmagicC_urbact-udine2.jpg.jpg" width="525" height="525" alt=" />

Designing an integrated action plan to make a difference

Once the Local Support Group agreed on how to approach the local issues related to Roma, the following step was to start working on an action plan, as expected from all cities joining an URBACT network. For Udine, this Local Action Plan had to reflect the participatory approach adopted in ROMA-NeT and to be the product of the Local Support Group. Not a proposal from the mayor neither the one of the municipality, but that of a group of active citizens and organisations empowered to contribute as experts in a policy-making process. For Udine’s team, the local action plan was key in formalising the priorities commonly defined by all stakeholders involved as well as the actions proposed to address the main problems. It was also the official basis to explore funding opportunities and building the appropriate funding engineering for implementation of the actions.  Eventually with the endorsement of the Local Action Plan by the municipality, the Local Support Group acquired a solid legitimacy. Maria Cantarutti speaks from an NGO perspective: “our fears have proved wrong. The URBACT method applied in Udine thanks to ROMA-NeT shows that bottom-up participation can actually be about creating real engagement among all stakeholders – Roma included. URBACT has changed the way we approach the issue in our local reality: from a paternalistic approach to a self-recognition approach, paving the way for a long-term solution that works with all parties involved”.

So much achieved with so little…

It did not take long for the URBACT method to bear its first results: within the three years of the project (ROMA-NeT ended in 2013), the number of people living in the illegal campsite has halved. “And without eviction orders!” stresses Antonella Nonino. Thanks to the URBACT Local Support Group, synergies have developed between stakeholders: for instance, Caritas, a local social housing organisation and a building company worked together to find a housing solution that would work with the Roma community.  Antonella is stunned by the first results achieved through Udine’s participation in ROMA-NeT. “Crime rates have sunk in the camp, 60% of its inhabitants have left it to find permanent accommodation, and that has been made available without resorting to expensive “security–inspired actions”! When you think that bulldozing a camp costs 250.000 euro...” What is more, ROMA-NeT has provided great visibility and legitimacy to the community of stakeholders involved in the Local Support Group. Maria is enthusiastic about the outcomes of their participation in the process: through URBACT, they have been approached by UNICEF, with which they are currently organising an after-school care for Roma children. “We have found out that some of these kids suffer from undiagnosed learning disabilities, one of the reasons for dropping out of school”. Another organisation has taught Roma women how to read and write, taking as an excuse the fact that they were not able to fill in the forms to collect the gas tanks offered to them for heating their lodges. Some of them managed to complete grade 8.   Above all, for Antonella Nonino, the most important outcome of the network for Udine is the change in mentalities: “before ROMA-NeT, we had scattered stakeholders trying to do their best to serve the community. Now we have qualified partners who are willing to keep learning”.  Antonella believes that in the years to come, it will be crucial to increase connections between URBACT networks and structural funds programming. “There is a “before” and an “after” participation in URBACT: everything changes to become more effective, more participatory, more transparent. ESF needs to be restructured accordingly. It would make no sense for ESF to keep financing the same actions when URBACT is going a step further in integration”, she continues. Her considerations are more than relevant: they are a wake-up call in a moment when the future of URBACT, a programme that has proved to work across cities and projects, is in the hands of the policy-makers. URBACT PILOT DELIVERY NETWORKS Together with EVUE and ESIMeC, ROMA-Net project was selected among the 3 delivery networks that will test city co-operation though URBACT into the (delivery) implementation phase of their projects. The challenge for the cities involved in these networks is how to maintain the sustainability and the integration (two main characteristics for URBACT action plans), through the implementation phase. Or otherwise said, how to make sure at all times that the actions taking place integrate the economic, social and environmental dimensions. Photo credits: UNDP Europe and CIS on flickr

Read more:

ROMA-NeT mini-site – URBACT website  – Project document 

ROMA-NeT 2  mini-site – URBACT website 

EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies – EC, DG Justice website 

Improving Impact for Roma Inclusion – Article from URBACT Blog