Networks and cities' news

Are Urban Gardens the place for modern community hubs?

From Rome (IT) to Vilnius (LT) and A coruna (ES), Urban Gardening plays a key role in creating social links and is at the forefront of social innovation.

Urban Gardening is a now widespread concept. That is how Wikipedia proposes to define it: "Urban gardening is the practice of cultivating, processing and distributing food in or around a town, or city. The concepts in Urban Gardens and the associated facilities have received significant attention and popularity in the last 10 years and are growing to meet the needs of the ever-developing urban life."

But what happens in real life in European cities and towns? How can one build and manage urban gardens? Are Urban Gardens just about gardening in public or private plots, or are they creating something else, that one could call real community hubs?

While you were designing your city logo, they built an entire city from scratch

Adrian Docea gives cities a long overdue wake up call, suggesting they take a leaf out of the private sector to build their brands before it’s too late.

He says: ‘We’re completely out of time. Europe needs to speed up or we will lose the global battle for attracting investors, tourists, students, ‘startupers’ and the best engineers, inventors and creative minds out there. We’re too slow, too conservative, way too relaxed about our future. Meanwhile the whole world is changing.’

Naples’ Urban Civic Communities

By Nicola Masella

Conferring a greater social value to the historical municipal assets by promoting open and inclusive management schemes

BLUACT: Why the Blue Economy is an increasing sea of opportunity

A report by Darinka Czischke, Conor Moloney and Catalina Turcu

INT-HERIT Road towards an Operational Implementation Plan

A compendium of two videos released in the past weeks about the last transnational meetings by INT-HERIT.

Why is Lisbon’s community economic development approach so important in Europe today?

Bairros (Neighbourhoods) and areas of priority interventions BIP/ZIP

Lisbon has developed a participative model for working in deprived neighbourhoods using the instrument of Community Led Local Development (CLLD) funded by the European Regional Development Fund. There are very few models of urban CLLD across Europe. Lisbon and the Hague are the two best examples. This paper looks in detail at the BIP/ZIP in Lisbon, which has been awarded an URBACT Good Practice Label in 2017.

The Lisbon BIP/ZIP strategy aims to promote social and territorial cohesion, active citizenship, self-organisation and community participation. Lisbon’s approach addresses the fracture of communities due to social, economic and environmental issues. When Lisbon started BIP/ZIP in 2010 their main idea was to identify neighbourhoods that were lacking social cohesion and suffered poor socio/economic, urban and environmental conditions. Most of all these areas lacked a meaningful connection between local citizens and the local authorities and so BIP/ZIP sought to build a new relationship through working together on relatively small projects of less than 50,000 EUR to improve conditions. The programme has been running across two EU programme periods starting in 2010 before the new CLLD article in the regulation. It is funded out of the National Operational programme (ERDF).

The Design of BIP/ZIP: A first mapping of the city’s social and territorial fractures