Mikael
Stigendal
Validated Lead Expert
Generic Skills
B.1. Understanding of integrated and sustainable urban development:
I received my PhD in 1994 on a thesis which dealt with the integrated and sustainable urban development of Malmö during the first post-war decades until 1985, when the Social Democratic party lost after 67 years in power. Since then, I have taken part in around 25 larger projects, all of them dealing with urban development and I have approached my tasks from what can be called an integration and sustainability perspective. Among the last projects was the Commission for a socially sustainable Malmö (2011-13) where I was one of 14 commissioners and also co-author of the final report. Furthermore, I work at a department which in several ways deals with the issue of integrated and sustainable urban development, namely the department of Urban Studies at Malmö University. In 2009, I designed a new course called Urban Integration which I then for three years was responsible for. I am also currently leading a newly established research group called Urban Integration. We have set ourselves the twin task of studying integrated and sustainable urban development as well as contributing to it by the use of interactive methods.
B.2. Understanding of exchange and learning processes at transnational level:
My experience of exchange and learning processes at transnational level goes back to the year 2000 and the project “Local partnerships and neighbourhood management” (DG Empl). Practitioners and researchers from six major cities across Europe took part in the project, led by Lawaetz Foundation in Hamburg. I wrote a report, drafted a questionnaire to facilitate the exchange, took part in the conferences, made study visits to the other cities and designed a conference in Malmö. Since then, I have designed and been involved in exchange and learning processes in a number of projects. One of them was the URBACT 1 project “Young people – from exclusion to inclusion”, 2004-06, where I was the lead expert. As part of URBACT 1, I was in charge of organization, preparation, coordination and monitoring of the first thematic seminar, held in Copenhagen. In URBACT 2, I was responsible for designing a workshop with peer reviews in Malmö for the partners in the Cohesion Network (CoNet). In the project Connections (DG Empl), I was part of the team that organized 2 days of peer reviewing in Malmö 2008 for partners from 7 European cities and carried out peer reviews in these other cities. During the last few years, I have been a work package leader in the FP7-project Citispyce, responsible for the work done by ten city teams across Europe.
B.3. Proficiency in English:
The evidence I can provide includes a lot of publications. During the last 15 years, I have written numerous reports in English for the projects that I have participated in. I have also written articles in English, the last one called “The future of capitalism will be decided in the cities”, published by the Poznan University of Economics Press in an anthology about the deepening crisis of the European Union. Furthermore, I have given numerous lectures and presentations in English at conferences, including being a key-note speaker a number of times. As lead expert and researcher in several projects, I have had to fulfil high demands on my capacity to communicate fluently in English.
Expertise for the design and delivery of transnational exchange and learning activities:
Summary Expertise for the design and delivery of transnational exchange and learning activities:
Since the year 2000, I have been involved in seven major transnational projects, each one lasting for at least a year, where I have had a role in the design and delivery of transnational exchange and learning activities. In ELIPSE (2002-03), where practitioners and researchers from five metropolitan cities across Europe reviewed innovative practices to combat social exclusion, I was the lead researcher. Then I became lead expert in the URBACT 1 project “Young people – from exclusion to inclusion”, 2004-06. In Connections (2008-09), I was part of a team from Malmö that carried out peer reviews in seven European cities in collaboration with other similar teams. In the ComIn project (2011-13), I worked with peer reviewing as well. Since then, I have participated in the FP7-project Citispyce (2013-15) and led one of the work packages. Besides these larger projects, I have been in charge of arranging, designing and monitoring meetings, like the first URBACT thematic seminar, held 2005 in Copenhagen, and the second thematic seminar, held 2006 in Stockholm. In URBACT 2, I was responsible for designing a workshop with peer reviews in Malmö 2009 for the partners in the Cohesion Network (CoNet). All these experiences have made me convinced about the significance of motivation for real exchange and learning to occur. For that reason, I have in most projects tried to involve partners in processes of interactive knowledge production, resulting in many reports.
Thematic expertise:
Theme / Policy:
Integrated Urban Renewal
Summary Thematic expertise:
My deep knowledge on this theme concerns the city as a whole. To be sure, I have done a lot of research regarding disadvantaged neighbourhoods but I have always insisted on dealing with such neighbourhoods in conjunction with the rest of the city, for example in the projects on living conditions that I led for three years in the middle of the 1990s and then again in 2006. Furthermore, in transnational projects like “Young people – from exclusion to inclusion”, funded by URBACT 1, I underlined the need to understand in what kind of society and city the young people were supposed to be included, on what conditions and how those conditions were possible to change. In Malmö, I have taken part in several major projects, initiated by the Malmö City Council, concerning an integrated urban renewal of the city as a whole, the first major one in 1995-6 called Vision Malmö 2000 and another major one during 2011-13 being the Commission for a socially sustainable Malmö. In both these initiatives, I have worked together with practitioners of various kinds as well as with other researchers. I have also done a lot of teaching. For example, this is the topic of the University course called Urban Integration, which I designed in 2009. During the last years, I have participated in the FP7 project Citispyce (2013-15), led a work package and written a comparative report on the different conditions for an integrated urban development across Europe.
Theme / Policy:
Local Governance
Summary Thematic expertise:
Local governance has in my work been both an object of study and a way of carrying out research. As an object of study, transnational projects like Social Polis (2008-10), Connections (2008-09) and ComIn (2011-13) have explicitly dealt with governance. Most of the projects have been carried out in socially innovative governance structures, involving stakeholders of various kinds. In the Commission for a socially sustainable Malmö (2011-13), where I was one of 14 commissioners, we called it knowledge alliances and suggested in one of our two overarching recommendations such inclusive ways of participating to be established whenever possible. Social innovation is also the subject of the FP7 project Citispyce, which I work with currently (2013-15). City management is one of the subjects of my new book which I will publish early next year, based on work that I’ve done in among else in the research project that I led 2011-13, funded by the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth, on the implementation, results and effects of metropolitan measures in Sweden funded by the ERDF. Community-Led Local Development, participation and Public-Private Partnership were subjects of the large-scale ERDF-funded project SÖM Fosie, where I was the on-going evaluator, and which won the prestigious RegioStar Award in 2012.
Theme / Policy:
Active Inclusion of Target Groups
Summary Thematic expertise:
I prefer not to treat groups as targets but as potential contributors to the development of cities and societies. In that respect, I have tried to involve such groups in most of the projects that I have been involved in. For example, that was the case with the School Integration Project, funded by the URBAN programme, which I led 1998-99 and where I recruited 24 unemployed young people at the age around 22. I wanted to take advantage of their competences regarding language and culture in a survey of schools. A training course was especially prepared for them and then more than 1300 pupils at three schools were interviewed by these young people. Since then, I have actively included different groups and categories in my work, in particular young people, locally, nationally and internationally. Working together in a number of projects with people to try to solve problems which concern them has enabled me to develop a deep knowledge of what it means to be excluded and the conditions for getting included as well as for changing such conditions. Active inclusion of young people has been the main subject of projects like, for example, the URBACT 1 “Young people – from exclusion to inclusion”, where I was the lead expert (2004-06) and the ongoing FP7 project Citispyce, where I have led a work package.
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 :
In the ERDF-funded project SÖM Fosie, which was carried out in the largest city district in Malmö during 2008-10, I was engaged as the on-going evaluator/researcher. The project involved many people from both outside and inside the City Council, also from different levels. As a red thread of my work, I arranged three workshops. The first one, based on an introductory report written by me and with around 50 persons attending, was about what problems SÖM Fosie should address. I wrote a report on the results, which formed basis for the following workshop, where we discussed in what ways SÖM Fosie could contribute to solving these problems. My third report concerned the results and pointed out the directions for the third workshop, which was about how to measure and assess the results. A fourth report written by me covered it all and was passed on to around 30 students from the course Urban Integration at Malmö University who reviewed SÖM Fosie from a critical perspective, but also on the basis of what the involved practitioners had found important. The students presented their results at a conference in December 2010 with around 70 practitioners who were then also given opportunity to talk to the students about their findings. This was to the advantage of both parties and influenced the further implementation of the project. Two years later, in 2012, the SÖM project won the prestigious RegioStar Award, category 4: Citystar – Integrated development of deprived urban areas.
E.2. Knowledge on integrated approach for the design, delivering, monitoring and evaluation of urban strategies/policies:
In the ESF-funded project New City, 2009-11, seven more senior young people were employed as mentors to excluded young people. These mentors offered motivating events, training and job opportunities, contacts etc. I was engaged as on-going evaluator and involved the seven mentors in my work. Meeting all these young people, the mentors learned a lot about their problems and ideas about the future. As I saw it, these experiences of the young people but also their reflections about them constituted an important potential. I tutored the mentors to write about their experiences from the encounters with the excluded young people. The on-going evaluation was then turned into an arena for knowledge production, where the experience and knowledge of the mentors were taken advantage of. It resulted in a comprehensive final report.
E.3. Awareness of the main policy and funding schemes for sustainable urban development at EU and national level:
My awareness of the sustainable urban development policies, trends and funds stems mainly from all the transnational and EU-funded projects that I have taken part in during the last 17 years. In some projects, such knowledge has been the explicit object to produce, for example when I during 2011-13 led a research project on the implementation, results and effects of metropolitan measures in Sweden funded by the ERDF. Besides all this explicitly or implicitly raised awareness, I follow regularly the development through subscribing to various newsletters as well as reading newspapers like the Guardian daily.
E.4. Ability to understand specific local situations and adapt tools and content to different local realities:
As part of my task as a lead expert in the URBACT 1-project “Young people – from exclusion to inclusion”, 2004-2006, I designed the work with baseline studies which included a selection of good practice in each of the partner cities. Although the same template was used for all partner teams, and they had to answer the same questions, the reports turned out to be difficult to compare due to the significant differences in contexts and preconditions. To enable comparisons, I then worked out five success criteria for good practice. They were presented at a conference in Aarhus and accepted by the partners because they built on their own reports and could therefore be recognized. These success criteria were then used as themes for group work at the conference. Parallel group work was arranged about all of the five criteria. In the group work sessions, the good examples were discussed with reference to each criterion. After the first session, the participants changed groups. The ones who had participated in the group work about, for example, “structural changes of schools” during the first session could, for example, be a part of the group work about “changing the view of knowledge” during the next session. All of this is further explained in the final report of the project. It is an example of how I have adapted tools and content on the basis of an understanding of the specific local situations so as to ensure consistency.
Summary Expertise:
I have supported local authorities and other stakeholders with such expertise in many projects. Let me here mention two of them. In the ERDF-funded project SÖM Fosie, which was carried out in the largest city district in Malmö during 2008-10, I was the on-going evaluator/researcher. I involved project participants and stakeholders in my work by arranging a series of workshop. The results of these workshops, going on for a year, was passed on to around 30 students from Malmö University who reviewed SÖM Fosie from a critical perspective but also on the basis of what the involved practitioners had found important. The students then presented their results to the practitioners at a conference. Two years later, in 2012, the SÖM project won the prestigious RegioStar Award.
In the ESF-funded project New City, seven elderly young people were employed during 2009-11 as mentors to excluded young people. These mentors offered motivating events, training and job opportunities, contacts etc. I was engaged as on-going evaluator and involved the seven mentors in my work. Meeting all these young people, the mentors got to know a lot about their problems and ideas about the future. I tutored the mentors to write about these experiences. The on-going evaluation was then turned into an arena for producing knowledge, where the experience and knowledge of the mentors were taken advantage of.
Informations
Residence location:
Sweden
Languages:
Swedish - Mother tongue
Foreign Languages level:
Foreign languages:
Email:
mikael.stigendal@mah.se