The Power of Civic Ecosystems How community spaces and their networks make our cities more cooperative, fair and resilient Edited by Levente Polyák, Sophie Bod and Luca Sára Bródy Learning from the ACTive NGOs URBACT network The Power of Civic Ecosystems How community spaces and their networks make our cities more cooperative, fair and resilient EDITORS Levente Polyák, Sophie Bod and Luca Sára Bródy COPY EDITING Sophie Bod and Lukács Hayes DESIGN Jorge Mosquera Suárez COVER IMAGE Jorge Mosquera Suárez PUBLISHER Cooperative City Books, Vienna, 2021 ISBN 978-3-9504409-2-8 contact Eutropian - Cooperating for Urban Justice email [email protected] web http://cooperativecity.org a pdf of this publication can be downloaded at cooperativecity.org join the eutropian / cooperative city mailing list at eutropian.org 2 Table of contents 9 Preface 9 Preface 19 Introduction 20 Introduction: The Power of Civic Ecosystems 32 Methods of ecosystem-building 37 The NGO House in Riga 44 Towards NGO Houses: Approaches to the people’s house model 49 Chapter 1 - Mapping civic initiatives 50 Citizen innovation maps 58 Learning from CIVICS: Mapping NGOs in Dubrovnik 60 How to develop a user-friendly service map of NGOs in Espoo? 64 Riga’s NGO Database 66 Learning from Riga: Santa Pola’s database of associations 70 Mapping the Darsena: In search of visions, lost and found 76 Festival as exploration: Super Festival in Milan 83 Mapping Priority Areas in Lisbon 89 Chapter 2 - Cultivating civic ecosystems 90 Riga’s cooperation framework 92 The development of the Neighbourhood Platform in Riga 96 Rada Brasa: A neighbourhood NGO in Riga 98 EJY ry: Building a civic ecosystem in Espoo 102 Collaborative commissioning in Brighton and Hove 112 What’s On in BN2 Five 114 Medialab Prado: A hub for social innovation 120 The Local Operators Platform 126 ECOS: Supporting Social and solidarity Economy in Barcelona 130 Kultura Nova: Supporting networks in the field of culture 3 Table of contents 139 Chapter 3 - Organising access to spaces 140 Free Riga: A platform for temporary use 144 Facilitating temporary use: The regulation of vacancy in Riga 148 The Lazareti Heritage Complex: Establishing a social-cultural centre 152 The Casa dei Cittadini in Syracuse 155 Facilities as a service: New approaches to sharing spaces 158 Confiscated Spaces as a common resource 162 Mercato Sonato: A hub for music and arts in a former market hall 167 Das Packhaus: A start-up community in a temporary use project 173 Hallo: Creating community spaces in Hamburg 179 Chapter 4 - Developing economic resilience 180 The Val di Noto Community Foundation: Mobilising local resources 184 Crowdfunding for the Orlando Youth Association 188 A community perspective on the power of asset of community value 193 Gólya: Collective ownership in a self-organised social centre 198 Nova Cvernovka: New life in an abandoned school complex 202 FRIEDA 23: A media and arts space in Rostock 207 Peter-Weiss-Haus: A literary centre in Rostock 211 The social value of Can Batlló 218 Barcelona’s Community Balance 4 Table of contents 223 Chapter 5 - Governing civic spaces 224 Governance model for Riga’s NGO House 225 Strategic and systemic partnerships: Learning from Riga 230 A potential governance mode for the BN2 Five community 232 Governance model for the Civic and Social Centre in Santa Pola 234 A governance model for Syracuse’s civic spaces 236 The value of cooperation: How did Syracuse learn from Riga? 242 Regulating the urban commons in Italy 248 The promotion of the commons in naples 254 In search of co-creation and collaboration through organic growth 260 Governing Dubrovnik’s civic spaces 264 Protocols for the Lazareti Platform 268 GABIP Lisbon: Support offices for local collaboration 273 Chapter 6 - Building new capacities 274 Kaņieris: Riga’s Youth Centre for realising ideas 278 Changing engagement in Brighton & Hove 282 Espoo’s NGO cooperation officer 284 Neighbourhood Mothers: From target group to actor 288 Service design for active NGOs 290 Community place: Developing a social-cultural centre 295 Third sector reform and social cooperatives in Italy 298 Public procurement with social impact 305 Ex OPG: A space to empower the neighbourhood and the city 314 Postface: With resilient civic ecosystems for future-proof cities 5 6 7 8 Preface The Power of Civic Ecosystems is an attempt to bring together a variety of practices, policies and methodologies within a common framework: the concept of civic LEVENTE ecosystems. Some of the stories that constitute this collection might seem to be very distant from each other, POLYAK but they share an ambition. This ambition is to build better cooperation between public administrations and local civic societies, and weave stronger civic tissues from the threads of individual organisations and initiatives where they can co-founder of Eutropian mutually support each other, based on their reciprocal and Lead Expert of knowledge and understanding of their local civic scenes. the URBACT Transfer Network ACTive NGOs While this book is based primarily on the experience of the URBACT Transfer Network ACTive NGOs(1), it actually builds on a variety of experiences stretching out to almost a decade. The work in the Budapest-based KÉK–Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre(2), and particularly the project Lakatlan(3) conducted between 2012-2016, operated with the notion of building synergies between a variety of local initiatives, when planning the reuse of vacant properties in Budapest. This effort gave birth to the books Vacant City(4)and Civil Város(5) (Civic City). At a more international level, with the organisation Eutropian(6), we have been working across Europe to help citizen initiatives and support public-civic cooperation, exploring 1 https://urbact.eu/active-ngos 2 http://kek.org.hu/en/ 3 http://lakatlan.kek.org.hu/ 4 https://cooperativecity.org/product/vacant-city/ 5 https://cooperativecity.org/product/civil-varos/ 6 https://eutropian.org/ 9 Funding the Cooperative City workshop in Rome, 2016. Photo (cc) Eutropian << many initiatives that, with or without public distribution models and circular waste support, are committed to build stronger management mechanisms. Since 2018, local networks. Recognising the importance in the framework of the H2020 project of these initiatives, we have been engaged Open Heritage(13), together with an in sharing their stories through the online international consortium of universities, magazine Cooperative City (7). research institutions, developers, ethical financiers and participation organisations, In the past years, the notion of civic we have been exploring innovative adaptive ecosystems has been omnipresent in heritage reuse models and the role local Eutropian’s work. In the research project partnerships(14) play in constructing them. Funding the Cooperative City(8) conducted between 2014 and 2017 and the book(9) of Besides our own research and strategic the same title, we explored how mobilising design work, we learned a lot from community resources and reorienting the many initiatives we encountered local economic flows through building throughout the years. Since 2013, we have local networks can help in creating and been cooperating with SEMAEST(15), a strengthening community spaces. In the public company of the Paris Municipality, URBACT network Interactive Cities(10), responsible for supporting and developing between 2016-2018, we worked together local commerce. In order to help individual with various European cities to enhance shops compete with larger chains, SEMAEST their digital communication with the private and its project COSTO(16) did not only and civil sectors as well as knowledge support shopkeepers to improve their digital institutions. This process included skills and visibility, but also helped them join streamlining communication channels and forces in order to share storage space, build building stronger cooperation within the a common online shop, or organise a joint respective cities’ digital ecosystems(11). delivery system. This approach marked us In 2019, based on years of events research as a common-sense way to help individual of the challenges of food markets, we organisations share their resources and build published the book Il rilancio dei mercati(12) networks in order to become more resilient (Relaunching markets) that has placed and competitive both individually and food markets in the broader context of collectively. food ecosystems, including short chain 10 And while there was a lot of talk about urban innovation ecosystems where different 7 https://cooperativecity.org/ companies build value chains based on 8 https://eutropian.org/funding-the-cooperative- as much collaboration as competition, the city/ 9 https://cooperativecity.org/funding-the- civil society and social economy equivalent cooperative-city/ of such networks of cooperation did not 10 https://urbact.eu/interactive-cities receive the same attention, despite having 11 https://cooperativecity.org/product/roadmap- a significant impact on broader social to-digital-urban-governance/ groups’ access to a variety of community 12 https://cooperativecity.org/product/il-rilancio- services and spaces. Step by step, we dei-mercati-spazio-pubblico-servizi-comunitari- realised that the ambition to bring together ed-economia-circolare/ civic initiatives, NGOs, social economy 13 https://openheritage.eu/ 14 https://openheritage.eu/wp-content/ organisations and other sectors into uploads/2021/03/Policy-Brief-2.pdf networks that can not only represent