Transfer Story: Toulouse. Urban Regeneration Mix, a relay reace about citizen participation

This international race, coordinated by the city of Łódź, bringing together 6 partner cities (Toulouse, Bologna, Braga, Birmingham, Baena and Zagreb), has as its theme urban regeneration and three types of competitions:
• urban regeneration,
• the conduct of citizen participation actions
• the strengthening of public-private partnerships.

STARTING LINE

The starting point of this race is at the top of a hill in Toulouse, on the site of a flagship urban development site, the ex-CEAT, with a rather successful consultation with the inhabitants for the development of a new district.
This hill is the one we see the most, an emblematic urban project of the City of Toulouse, innovative means, practices and projects in the field of consultation. But it hides many other small hills, which are worth observing in terms of consultation.
This is how the search for relays of good practices within the community began. And what was our surprise to discover other hills, with interesting but little-known practices in terms of citizen participation: the route of the race was then widened.
The Urbact project made us realize that citizen participation was finally a theme that cuts across many of the city’s departments. There is an analysis of professions department within the City of Toulouse that develops many tools and approaches, but which are sometimes insufficiently known to other intermediaries involved in the field of citizen participation.
The question then arose how this hill could make the link with other places in Toulouse that presented other consultation’s good practic

A FRESH BOOST

The race continued and the refuelling in Bologna was invigorating. The runners were starting to run out of breath and the public was getting scarce. The Italians presented many projects and ideas that fed into the reflections and the handover took place under optimal conditions: the runners were bursting with energy! The baton was passed and the cultural aspect surfaced thanks to non-verbal body expression workshops opening up the field of new cooperations and new skills around consultation (culture, socio-cultural animation...).

Another step was a photo exhibition of a development project, to keep a record of the life of the site before it was demolished and to integrate the point of view of a particular audience that is difficult to capture: young children. It is important to include everyone and not leave them by the side of the road as spectators.

The race continued by bringing new race partners and new ideas to Toulouse Métropole. Consultation is an objective, a finishing line, but can be done by different means, integrating many skills and directions, necessary to reach the success.

OVERTAKING

Arriving in the middle of the race, strengthened by these different supplies, and the different experiences of the runners, a new, wider landscape arrived, offering new horizons but was also frightening. The race still seems long: how to bring together these new runners, this new public, to reach the finishing line and succeed in the challenge of transferring good practices? So the idea of an internal seminar bringing together all the runners of the race “citizen participation” was born. A final stage in Braga consolidated this idea with the presentation of the Public Private Residential Partnership, which made it possible to formalize the proposal for an event in Toulouse.

THE SUPPOR OF URBACT

The race organisation team, the Urbact team, helped to light the way to the finishing line as best as possible. The different runners, the other cities, came to support us in the race and to enrich our ideas to lead to the construction of an internal event based on consultation, itself co-constructed with all the directions involved.
The idea of a new challenge in our race was born: to share an inventory of our practices and our needs through an approach that facilitates collective intelligence via the organization of an internal and inter-directorate seminar for a common framework around citizen participation. The Transfer Plan then evolved and was finalized: the work of bringing together the different departments involved in any form of citizen participation began. The concretization of this idea was made possible thanks to the support offered by the lead expert to refine this idea which began to emerge in December 2019. The TNMs prepared by each city, the phases of work, reflection in transnational groups and the meeting of new actors, really allowed us to give more substance to this idea and to find a way to propose it. The participation in the URBACT project and the creation of the ULG have been decisive to begin to create a link between directions on this project, and to be legitimized to carry such a transversal and common project to all.

The FINISHING LINE is close, but new stages are emerging: shared and collegial drafting of specifications to select a service provider to lead the process around theseminar, choice of organizer, sending of invitations, choice of facilitators, association and discovery of new directions that can find a PLACE IN THE PROJECT... This RACE IS NEVER OVER, with always new challenges and challenges to be taken up TO WORK TOGETHER and create a COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE with NEW PARTNERS. There are more and more participants in the race, the race is longer, but we will manage to go much further, in order, perhaps to MOTIVATE OTHER RUNNERS for another Urbact project and TO MAKE THE SEEDS that germinated bear fruit in our administration?

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