by Giulia Spinaci | Dec 17, 2014 | The Urban Media Lab
Once again the European Union has been the driving force of social innovation, through the so-called Grundtvig Programme. Often underestimated in its innovative and cohesive potential, since 2000 the European Union has regularly funded projects devised at the national level which succeed in providing the adult population “with ways to improve their knowledge and skills, keeping them mentally fit and potentially more employable”. An honorable goal, but what does it have to do with the commons?
Simple. In 2011, the Grundtvig call for proposals ended with 56 winning multilateral projects, among which “The EU’rban Gardens Otesha project“, better known as EU’GO. It seems that the fashion and , more interestingly, the social value of the urban shared gardens has been finally recognized at a supranational level. The result is that out of the €337.330 budget required to carry out this project, exactly 75% was provided directly by the European Union. An astonishing result that reminds us the need to develop alternative ways to enhance and improve the human capital, while also tightening interpersonal relations in discrimination-free contexts.
But what did “Piste-solidaires” – the promoter of EU’GO – devise?
In few words, EU’GO represented a bridge; a bridge that connected at once not only five countries – Italy, Germany, France, Spain and UK – but also all those local associations of citizens fully convinced that urban gardens might become propagation centers of best practices and of social inclusion, of education and of urban well-being. Social cohesion, cultural integration, sustainable development: these, thus, are the pivot themes of the EU’GO project, paying special attention to the most vulnerable segments of the society – immigrants, women, youth, disabled and elderly. The cities are meeting place par excellence. At least in theory. In fact, it was from the very reflection upon urban marginalization, isolation and discrimination that EU’GO took shape.
Transnational by nature and educational in its aims, EU’GO set an online platform in order to share the know-how and the skills developed (literally) on field in the so-called Otesha gardens. The latter, in the words of the promoters are “green spaces, innovative and active learning spaces that promote […] the collective creation of social, generational and intercultural bonds“. And so it is, in fact. Successful gardens blossomed like flowers and by word of mouth, an ever-increasing number of people devoted their time to the earth. Even indirectly, benefits were brought to the cause, by simply focusing the attention of the general public on the sustainable development issues and on the importance of social cohesion.
Too good to be true? Yes and No. Yes, because the project lasted two years only. A too short lapse of time, even to assess some results, if we consider that the effects on a community’s way of thinking can be ascertained only in the long run.
No, because notwithstanding, EU’GO might represent a starting point, a benchmark for the States’ policy-making and for active citizens. In the light of EXPO 2015 and the latter’s focus on nutrition, poor and developing countries, together with the developed ones in the need to rethink their relationship with the planet and their strategies to foster social inclusion, might then see in EU’GO a successful experiment.
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Sviluppo sostenibile a braccetto con l’inclusione sociale: EU’GO!
Quando lo sviluppo sostenibile incontra l’inclusione sociale: il progetto EU’rban Gardens Otesha, finanziato dall’Unione Europea, ha riportato risultati sorprendenti. Risultati limitati dalla breve durata del progetto, ma che potrebbero rivelarsi un utile esempio per chiunque voglia rivedere il proprio rapporto con la terra e al contempo sviluppare strategie innovative volte alla coesione sociale.
by Giulia Spinaci | Nov 6, 2014 | The Urban Media Lab
Another step further has been taken by the local administration in the promotion of the public/private partnership and in the care of the green public spaces. It is the case of Rome, where on 17th October 2014, a new regulation on the urban vegetable gardens and shared gardens was approved by the City Council, together with two more regulations, respectively on the management of the masts and on the adoption of the dog parks.
These three regulations stem from the merge of the old concept of the importance of green and clean areas in our cities and the newly born idea of the private/public partnership for the pursuit of the common interest. Some say that Italy still lags behind many States in this regard, and this is certainly true, but we should also give credit to the (few) milestones of the past 15 years.
In fact, few people know that long before the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol and of the global awareness on the importance of a sustainable development, the Italian Parliament adopted Law No. 113 in 1992. It might seem anonymous, but it marked one of the first attempts made to take care of the environment. Municipalities with more than 15.000 inhabitants have the duty to plant a tree for each newborn, within twelve months from the date of entry into the public registry. It was a very short law, with four articles only, bur surprisingly the Parliament came to an agreement and allocated 5 billion liras per year to this end. Not bad!
Recently, this law was modified, when in 2013, Law No. 10 provided for the creation of a monitoring board with the aim of assessing the results and of issuing an annual report to be sent to the Parliament. But Law No.10/2013 is like a matryoshka doll. Actually, it modified also a 1997 Law (No. 449), which laid the foundations of the public/private partnership. In fact, according to this Law, the public administration might enter in a contractual agreement with non-profit private companies and associations, for the pursuit of the common interest. Among the initiatives foreseen by this bill, there are also the reduction of CO2 emission and the creation and maintenance of green areas. Nevertheless, the real innovation of Law 10/2013 is Art. 6, which states that the regions, the provinces and the municipalities shall promote an increase in the green urban areas, while also promoting the energetic efficiency.
When analyzing all these normative provisions, we should take into consideration that the results deriving from the practical implementation might not be the expected ones. However, the ever-increasing awareness of the civil society on this kind of topics helped in developing a productive relationship with the public administration, by demonstrating the willingness to be the driving force of change. The events of the last years left us with a bitter taste: green areas are abandoned and unsafe places and unfortunately, public funds are almost dried up. For this reason, many people throughout Italy created non-profit associations with the only aim of taking care of the public gardens, areas and parks. It is a bottom-up process that spread quickly and induced many municipalities to recognize this legitimate interest and to approve regulations in order to move with the times. Consequently, cities like Parma, Genoa, Florence, and Turin endorsed a green strategy and on October 17th, 2014 Rome finally joined them.
Direct emanation of Law No. 10/2013, which explicitly promoted, facilitated and supported the creation of shared and vegetable gardens, the new regulation approved in Rome represents a great outcome. In fact, the citizens might participate in a public announcement in order to ask the custody of free plots of land and transform them into vegetable gardens. The limits are three: the plots shall be maximum 60 sqm; no GMOs are allowed; the products shall not be marketed. Quite feasible, though! On the other hand, the municipality undertakes to supply water and land, assuring reasonable prices to associations for the pursuit of social purposes, like educational activities for the schools. In fact, as the Council member for the Environment Estella Marino highlighted, vegetables and shared gardens have also a social function, being perfect places for exchanges of ideas and for encounter.
In sum, this regulation is a victory for the citizens of Rome and when it will be voted and approved also by the City Assembly, many people and associations will be ready with hoes and spades.
by Giulia Spinaci | Oct 20, 2014 | The Urban Media Lab
We often hear people talking about them, but still there is not a definition upon which scholars and experts agree. However, when the discussion is about social business and social enterprises, we should take into consideration Muhammed Yunus, the Bangladeshi entrepreneur, pioneer of the microcredit and awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. It goes without saying that his credentials are astonishing and he succeeded in listing a set of characteristics common to all social enterprises.
They are not-for-profit legal persons providing goods and services on a permanent basis, whose social element is intrinsic and they can either serve the community’s interest or the interest of its members. They are independent entities that are democratically managed through participatory models, which involve also the civil society.
We can easily imagine the benefits this kind of enterprises might bring both to the labour and product market and to the European community as a whole, and these benefits were thoroughly analyzed in May 2011, when the European Commission first launched the “Social Business Initiative (SBI)”. The aim was that of recovering the citizens’ confidence in the Single Market and to meet the expectations of the social business community throughout Europe. Not only. There were and still there are great expectations as regards the job-creation potential, the improvement of the work integration and the creation of sustainable models of business in an innovative way. Without the need to read between the lines, the SBI is directly linked to the goals of the 2020 Strategy.
For this reason, a series of workshops and roundtables were organized with a two-fold mission. On the one hand, they had to define the phenomenon of the social business and to present the advantages of fostering its economic presence in the marketplace. On the other hand, they had to list concrete proposals to be submitted to the European Commission. All this represented the preparatory work that led to the adoption of the “Social Business Initiative” in October 2011.
Surprisingly, most of the proposed solutions were embraced by the final text of the initiative and all the aspects that are related to the universe of the social business were tackled. Among them, we should recall the financial aspect, micro-finance, the European regulatory framework, the need for better visibility of social businesses and the education and capacity building topic.
First, in fact, the action plan of the SBI provides for the improvement of the access to funding. One of the most important hindrances for the social entrepreneurs is the mismatch between the supply and the demand sides, which obviously makes them less attractive when we speak about access to credit. Moreover, an insufficient clarity on both the European and the State laws on the matter and the continuous difficulty in setting up new microfinance institutions (MFIs) add big hurdles for the social enterprises willing to enter the marketplace and to offer innovative and useful services. Therefore, the SBI provided for a € 90 million financial instrument able to respond to the needs of the European social business community, together with the creation of a European regulatory framework for social investment and of the Progress Microfinance Facility, which was launched in 2010 and increased the availability of microcredit – loans below € 25 000. The funding will be allocated in the European Union programme for Social Change and Innovation and the European Social Fund (ESF) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) will support the SBI’s projects in the Member States.
Furthermore, as usual when we talk about social innovation, the compelling need that everybody faces is to increase the visibility of the best practices. The SBI, thus, promotes the creation of a European platform and database, where social entrepreneurs and in general, the civil society might exchange replicable models of social entrepreneurship, fostering this way a mutual learning practice and transparency as a value.
Finally, from a legal point of view, the European Commission detected the need to review and reform the then-existing regulatory framework, with regards to the social business at large, in order to improve the capacity of individuals to orientate among the numerous and sometimes overlapping rules. The consolidation and simplification of the European laws has then become the fil rouge of the SBI, which moreover had the aim of enhancing the element of quality in awarding contracts, especially in the case of social and health services.
In sum, the Social Business Initiative represented in 2011 a courageous attempt of tackling a deficiency of the economic system that never promoted social businesses or even threatened their existence, because of the market rules. In this sense, the SBI might be the driving force for a drastic change that might put the social enterprises into the foreground. Doing this at the European level gives an added value to the whole initiative, because “public policies at the European level can help ensure that there is a real Single Market with a level playing field for all economic actors, including social businesses. EU level action represents a cost-effective way to collect in a structured way information on the nature, scale and dynamics of social enterprises and thus provide a basis for an unbiased political dialogue with Member States and stakeholders”.
by Giulia Spinaci | Jun 18, 2014 | The Urban Media Lab
Conference of donors for the regeneration of Lake Chad
On April 4-5, 2014, a conference was held in Bologna with the specific aim of facing the ecological disaster that Chad is victim of, namely the drying-up of Lake Chad and to collect funds to finance the five-year investment plan for its revitalization. The conference was the result of years of international cooperation at all levels and it had the privilege to host not only the most important actors of the African continent, but also eminent personalities of the Italian politics. In fact, the President of Mauritania and current President of the African Union, Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz, the President of Niger, Mahamadou Issoufou, the President of Chad, Idriss Déby Itno, the President of the African Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and the former President of Nigeria, Olusengun Obasanjo attended the conference. On the other hand, among the participants there were also Lapo Pistelli, Deputy Minister of Italian Foreign Affairs, Vasco Errani, president of the Emilia Romagna Region, Vincenzo Stingone, Quaestor of Bologna and Mario Ennio Sodano, Prefect of Bologna. The Chairman of the conference was the President of the UN-African Union working group, Romano Prodi, who is also the President of the Foundation for World Wide Cooperation. The latter has been the driving force of the renewed interest in Lake Chad. The reasons why Lake Chad is so fundamental for the local populations were best explained by Romano Prodi, who in his opening remarks pointed out that the Lake constitutes the most important hydrographic system of that region. During the last 50 years, the lake has lost 90% of its water resources, thus provoking not only en ecological disaster, but also a humanitarian one. The security and stability of the region is at stake, since its fragile equilibrium risks to be broken by extremist factions, international terrorists and in particular by the fight for the scarce resources, in a context where the population overcrowding will be a matter of serious concern in the near future. The international community has been trying several times to devise possible solutions and technical plans to revitalize Lake Chad, and the last significant effort is represented by the “Transaqua project”, which over thirty years ago envisaged the possibility of linking the near Congo river with Lake Chad. Today, the technical plan around which the conference revolved draws inspiration from the Transaqua project, but it is more far-reaching than its predecessor is. In fact, it deals not only with technical matters, such as the re-organization of the production systems and the rehabilitation of the actual irrigation systems, but also with political issues, like the improvement of the local governance and the creation of a permanent international cooperation, in order to assure a continuous supervision of the phenomenon. Thus, the only durable solution possible is one that takes into consideration the importance of Lake Chad for the African peoples and in which the local governments undertake their responsibility of revitalizing the area, under the auspices of the whole international community. The Bologna conference was a step towards such a solution and on April, 5th the “Declaration of Bologna” was finally approved, which represents the basis of the launch of the action plan which will be operative in the forthcoming meeting of the Commission of Lake Chad (CBLT) that will take place in July 2014. The Bologna Declaration demonstrates that a sustainable future for the Lake Chad region is possible only through the creation of partnerships between public and private actors willing to regenerate an environmental common good that represents the future of the African continent.
by Giulia Spinaci | May 23, 2014 | The Urban Media Lab
On Saturday June 14th 2014, from 10 am to 10 pm, the city of Bologna will host the first RENA Festival of the Communities for Change, at Palazzo Re Enzo.
RENA is an independent and plural association centred on young people who want to make Italy an Open, Responsible, Transparent and Balanced country. For the first time, RENA has organized a Festival, which will provide all willing organizations, public administrations, associations and enterprises a place to build new forms of collaboration.
Thanks to the 2013 RENA project “A caccia di Pionieri”, RENA has seen that in Italy, there are many innovative communities, which represent the future of the country. Thus, the Festival of the Communities for Change will be a workshop day, where all best energies of the country will have the opportunity to meet and to exchange their success stories. The topics of discussion will range from crowdfunding to sharing economy, from social innovation to governance of the commons.
Don’t miss this wonderful opportunity to leave an indelible mark!
