by Rok Kranjc | Nov 6, 2017 | The Urban Media Lab
World Game Seminar at New York Studio School (1969, New York). Courtesy of Stanford University Libraries Special Collections
»Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone« – Buckminster Fuller[1]
»Imagine a future where cities are modeled, tested, designed, and reshaped through interactive, collaborative games« – Ekim Tan[2]
In recent years there has been a major upsurge in theories around and prefigurative experimentation with various alternative institutional models (e.g. commons-based urban co-governance, platform cooperativism, alternative currencies,[3] universal basic assets,[4] circular economy) that challenge the unquestionability of the neoliberal narrative[5] and reflect and integrate to various degrees new and old ideas about possible alternative forms of societal and political economic organization. The many (political) challenges associated with the uptake, experimentation with and scaling of such path-deviant models have prompted parallell developments of more nuanced theories around innovation and institutional change,[6] as well as the articulation and development of novel techniques, tools and platforms that may help incite and facilitate transformations towards sustainability.
With regard to the latter, sustainability foresight is increasingly recognized as a key component. Foresight in short entails various typically participatory and transdisciplinary engagements – e.g. in the form of creating visions, scenarios, backcasts and transition pathways – that help actors better understand and account for possible futures and the processes of change, so that wiser preferred futures and pathways can be created.[7] Additionally, developments in experiential futures and speculative design,[8] generative city gaming[9] and internet and communications technologies (ICTs) enabled network foresight[10] have begun to outline exciting new possibilities of more engaging, strategic, cross-scale, multi-actor, collaborative and anticipatory (i.e. futures oriented) forms of deliberation, cosmopolitan city-making and governance.
Two concepts crucial to zoom in here are anticipatory governance and global foresight commoning. Anticipatory governance may denote practices that involve tools, systems and open knowledge platforms that empower futures-inquiry and futures-making by enabling the smaller and larger scale pre-imagining and exploration of dynamics of change and near and distant future possibilities and in turn informing the development of strategies, pathways, policies, designs and experiments.[11] Global foresight commons has been taken up by some scholars as a concept denoting »a network of globally distributed and shared resources between people, institutions, businesses and other communities, which provides an increasing and useful pool of knowledge, ideas and capabilities that potentiate all of humanity’s capacity to think about shared futures in effective ways.«[12]
While as of yet largely speculative and/or experimental, in very recent years projects have emerged that may be considered as prefigurations or components of more integrated, cross-scale, polycentric and collaborative foresight, knowledge, design and governance supporting systems, i.e. systems that support »wiki-commoning«,[13] social innovation, policymaking, socio-technical-ecological transition design[14] and reflexive transition management.[15] Interesting existing examples of such projects include:
- Seeds of Good Anthropocenes: a repository that maps more than a hundred initial case studies, and allows, by means of a questionnaire-type interface, for the crowdsourcing of ‘seeds’, i.e. initiatives, at least in prototype form, that represent diverse »social, technological, economic, or social–ecological ways of thinking or doing.«[16]
- TRANSIT Critical Turning Points: a platform that contains a database and global map of social innovation initiative case studies, and an overview of ‘critical turning points’; i.e. the »breakthroughs, setbacks, and surprises« concerning their emergence and development.[17]
- Open Futures Library: a »publically contributed, indexed, searchable collection of future scenarios and other images of the future.«[18]
- Play the City: a transdisciplinary research organization and online platform that researches, develops with urban stakeholders, and offers a database of games around issues such as urban transformation, social change, smart cities, and sharing and circular economy.[19]
- Foresight Engine: a »platform for engaging various publics in rapid conversation about pressing issues of the future, using basic game dynamics to make it fun and encourage participation.«[20]
The Co-Cities project’s Commoning.city (www.commoning.city) platform may also be regarded as a possible prefigurative constitutent of such systems, which, much akin to Seeds of Good Anthropocenes, counts more than a hundred initial case studies and offers a global map and questionnaire-based crowdsourcing of new entries, albeit with an explicit focus on forms of collaborative city-making and participatory urban governance, and the teasing out, application and refining of institutional design principles for the urban commons.[21]
Numerous questions regarding such systems however remain, of which, to conclude, I outline some of the most pertinent:
(1) In what ways may such and other (digital and/or face-to-face) tools and platforms complement each other in creating more robust and comprehensive toolboxes, or pooling, co-creative and moderation systems; e.g. linking »seed« case studies, designs, design principles and repositories; existing scenarios and other tools for and ways of expressing, experiencing, exploring, playing and experimenting with possible, plausible, probable, desirable, utopian, dystopian, heterotopic and other alternative futures (e.g. films, games, theatrical performances, comics, interactive virtual reality experiences, and artefacts from the future); with ICT enabled network capabilities; new tool and content generation; transition pathway mapping; »citizen sensing«,[22] simulations of (gl-)urban socio-ecological metabolisms; and value and »strong sustainability«[23] based service and product design; in virtuous cycles of open sharing, co-production, experimentation and co-evolution?
(2) In what ways and by what means can lessons learned from such endeavors be transposed to the real world by trandisciplinary communities of practice?[24]
(3) How can such engagements commensurate different interests, worldviews and ways of knowing, and/or make any inherent tensions, discomforts and knowledge gaps productive?[25]
(4) Whose and what kinds of »transformative capacities«[26] are being and can be developed through the use of such approaches, and how do and can these contribute to smaller and wider transformative change?
(5) In what ways may these approaches represent new »emancipatory and egalitarian modalities of politics«[27] and cosmopolitan forms of city-making,[28] and how may these correspond to (i.e. be in conflict with, compliment, transform) existing institutional and actor constellations, norms, roles, responsibilities and power relations?
(6) What are the useful and appropriate forms of analysis, moderation, transposition, codification and meta-data enrichment of small and larger scale workshop, interview, questionnaire, deliberative poll, scenario, game-play, etc., results, for various applications in open knowledge pooling and (co-)creation?
(7) How can »seeds«, theories of change, design tools, etc., be integrated in the form of engaging game based, network enabled, and other (hybrid?) practices of foresight? How can and/or should the mechanics, design and set-up of these today account for and/or incorporate the politics of transformations towards sustainability?[29]
(8) What kinds of tools can enable the evaluation and (re-)combination (through »bricolage«) and multi-tier scaling (i.e. scaling up, out and deep)[30] of »seeds« or social innovations to foster more future-fit, multi-dimensional and complex socio-ecological systems oriented experiments, transition pathways and institutional alternatives?
(9) Assuming that today radical transformations are necessary to stay within surmisable planetary boundaries,[31] how can the design and set-up of such tools, systems and platforms ensure that co-creation involving different stakeholders is deliberatively yet normatively geared towards path-deviant and more radical innovation, rather than path-dependency and the status quo?
(10) Can immersive and confrontational experiential futures (e.g. confronting actors with ‘voices of future generations’,[32] or undesirable socio-ecological futures extrapolated from scenarios and simulations of continued status quo) accelerate (social, political, economic, etc.) paradigm shifts, and what may be the ramifications of such tactics and strategies?
[1] Fuller, B. (1971). The World Game: Integrative Resource Utilization Planning Tool. World Resources Inventory. Carbondale.
[2] https://dezwijger.nl/programma/the-future-of-urban-gaming.
[3] https://roarmag.org/essays/moneylab-conference-alternative-currencies/.
[4] https://medium.com/institute-for-the-future/universal-basic-assets-abb08ca2f0fc.
[5] Longhurst et al. (2017) Experimenting with alternative economies: four emergent counter-narratives of urban economic development. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 22, 69–74
[6] Haxeltine et al. (2016). TRANSIT WP3 Deliverable D3.3 – A Second Prototype of TSI Theory. http://www.transitsocialinnovation.eu/resource-hub/transit-wp3-deliverable-d33-a-second-prototype-of-tsi-theory-deliverable-no-d33.
[7] Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming. Foresight, 10(1), 4–21.
[8] Dunne, A., & F. Raby (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge & London: MIT Press; Candy, S. (2010). The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios (PhD thesis). School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
[9] Tan, E. (2016) The Evolution of City Gaming. In: Portugali J., Stolk E. (eds) Complexity, Cognition, Urban Planning and Design. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham; Schouten, B., Ferri, G., de Lange, M. & K. Millenaar (2017). Games as Strong Concepts for City-Making. Playable Cities, Gaming Media and Social Effects; Other interesting examples of ‘commons transition’ games include Utopoly (http://www.neilcummings.com/content/utopoly), Transition Ingredients Cards (https://transitionnetwork.org/news-and-blog/transition-ingredients-cards-english-italian-chinese/) and C@rds in Common (http://www.bollier.org/blog/crds-common-learning-about-commons-through-play).
[10] Ramos, J.M, Mansfield, T. & G. Priday (2012). Foresight in a Network Era: Peer-producing Alternative Futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 17(1), 71–90; Raford, N. (2014). Online foresight platforms: Evidence for their impact on scenario planning & strategic foresight. Technological Forecasting & Social Change (97): 65–76.
[11] Ramos, J.M. (2014). Anticipatory Governance: Traditions and Trajectories for Strategic Design. Journal of Futures Studies, 19(1), 35–52; Boyd, E., Borgstrom, S., Nykvist, B., & I.A. Stacewicz (2015). Anticipatory governance for social-ecological resilience. Ambio, (44): 149–161.; Ravetz, J. (2017). From “smart” cities to “wise”: synergistic pathways for collective urban intelligence, JPI Urban Europe – Urban Transition Pathways Symposium; http://actionforesight.net/anticipatory-governance-and-the-city-as-a-commons/.
[12] http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_a_global_foresight_commons/.
[13] Iaione, C. (2016). The CO-City: Sharing, Collaborating, Cooperating, and Commoning in the City. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 75(2): 415-455.
[14] Irwin, T. (2016). Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research. Design and Culture, 7(2), 229–246.
[15] Voß, J., & B. Bornemann (2011). The politics of reflexive governance: challenges for designing adaptive management and transition management. Ecology and Society 16(2): 9
[16] Bennett et al. (2016). Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 14(8): 441–448.; https://goodanthropocenes.net/.
[17] http://www.transitsocialinnovation.eu/discover-our-cases; http://www.transitsocialinnovation.eu/sii
[18] http://openfutures.net/; see also Priday, G., Mansfield, T., & J.M. Ramos (2014). The Open Futures Library: One Step Toward a Global Foresight Commons? Journal of Futures Studies, 18(4): 131–142.
[19] https://www.playthecity.nl/; http://gamesforcities.com/.
[20] http://www.iftf.org/foresightengine/.
[21] http://www.commoning.city/; see also https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2017/08/20/ostrom-city-design-principles-urban-commons/.
[22] Gabrys, J. (2014) Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(1): 30 – 48
[23] Hobson, K. (2013). “Weak” or “Strong” Sustainable Consumption? Efficiency, Degrowth, and the 10 Year Framework of Programmes. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 31(6), 1082–1098
[24] Cundill, G., Roux, D. J., & J. N. Parker (2015). Nurturing communities of practice for transdisciplinary research, Ecology and Society, 20(2): 22.
[25] Vervoort et al. (2015). Scenarios and the art of worldmaking. Futures (74): 62–70.
[26] Wolfram, M., Frantzeskaki, N., & S. Maschmeyer (2016) Cities, systems and sustainability: status and perspective of research on urban transformations, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (22): 18–25.
[27] Swyngedouw, E. (2016). Unlocking the mind-trap: politicising urban theory and practice. Urban Studies, 54(1): 55-61
[28] Manzini, E., & M. K. M Rithaa (2016). Distributed Systems And Cosmopolitan Localism: An Emerging Design Scenario For Resilient Societies. Sustainable Development, 24(5): 275–280
[29] Patterson et al. (2016). Exploring the governance and politics of transformations towards sustainability. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 1–16; Avelino, et al. (2016). The Politics of Sustainability Transitions. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 18(5): 557–567
[30] Moore, M.-L., Ridell, D. & D. Vocisano (2015) Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep: Strategies of Non-profits in Advancing Systemic Social Innovation. The Journal of Corporate Citizenship No. 58, Large Systems Change: An Emerging Field of Transformation and Transitions (June 2015), 67–84; Olsson, P., M.-L. Moore, F. R. Westley, & D. D. P. McCarthy (2017). The concept of the Anthropocene as a game-changer: a new context for social innovation and transformations to sustainability. Ecology and Society 22(2):31.
[31] Steffen et al. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223): 1259855
[32] Y. Kamijo, A. Komiya, N. Mifune & T. Saijo (2017) Negotiating with the future: incorporating imaginary future generations into negotiations, Sustainability Science, 12, 409-420.
Un focus sul gaming applicato ai nuovi modelli di collaborazione tra gli attori operanti a livello urbano, uno sguardo sui progetti sperimentali già attivi a livello internazionale, e alcune domande aperte sui tool digitali che sono emersi e quelli che emergeranno.
by Anna Berti Suman | Oct 30, 2017 | The Urban Media Lab
When it comes to discussing the role of civil society in water management, the experience of the Italian “consorzi” (consortia) is worth of attention. Similar examples, representing the material implementation of the horizontal subsidiarity, result in being particularly successful in cases of small communities with a high degree of social cohesion. However, its applicability in medium to large contexts becomes more problematic[1] because, as “The Tragedy of the Commons” theory reminds[2], a shared power of a large group on water is likely to generate an uncontrolled exploitation of the resource. As a matter of fact, the wider becomes the community of reference, the least the inhabitants feel themselves bound by the limits necessary for a proper common governance of the resource and the more they are tempted to waste it. This risk makes often preferable solutions like the exclusive control of the State on water or privatization of the water system[3].
In this contribution, the “consortium approach” to water management is presented as a successful experience in the Italian scenario. The consortium model consists of the entrustment of the service to cooperatives where users directly participate. Although this approach has been limitedly adopted in Italy, it is growing in other European countries[4]. Efficient examples can be found in Holland – the Waterschapenn – and in Wales – for example, Welsh Water.
These solutions share the feature to be an alternative to the direct assumption of the water service’s responsibility by the State. The key advantage here identified is that the service is directly supervised by the citizens, which are incentivized to participate in water management.
For the Italian case, a relevant example is represented by the Consorzi di Bonifica and the Consorzi di sviluppo industriale. The first entities mainly operate in the agricultural sector, although there are hypothesis in which they have also the task to manage public services and to take care of water supply infrastructures. The second bodies are located in industrial areas and manage not only the industrial infrastructures, but also water treatment plants, acting in synergy with the authorities entrusted with the water service[5].
Specifically, it is noteworthy the experience of the small-sized municipalities in the northern part of Italy, where a solution neither private, nor public, but common has been adopted for water management. For example, in the Oltrepò Pavese, the 24 hamlets of Varzi have joined their efforts to govern the water service through a communitarian approach. A similar solution has been chosen by the communities of Mezzana Montaldo in the Alto Biellese and of Cerveno in the Alta Val Camonica. Furthermore, the experience of the Consorzio acque delta ferrarese (now transformed in a stock company under the name of C.A.D.F. Spa) is particularly timely as it represents an example of water management in common through a consortium created in reaction and opposition to the HERA model, the PPP dominant in the area.
These consortia fight to defend their autonomy; they are reluctant to give away their know-how and resources to the private market and resist to the pressure of political interests. Indeed, these consortia have to resist the centripetal pressure of the State which, for economic and logistical reasons, tend to consolidate them in a few ATOs (Ambiti Territoriali Ottimali), which arguably is the first step which will lead to the conferral of the ATO to private operators[6].
It could be affirmed that there are certain similarities between this communitarian approach and the approach adopted by the medieval municipalities in which the public goods, like the woods, the fields, the springs etc. were managed in common. This ancient solution might result in being an efficient alternative in a moment of public utilities’ crisis. An antique practice can be the answer to modern difficulties of the actual society.
Moreover, the consortium approach represents the fulfillment of Article 43 of the Italian Constitution which states that essential public services can be conferred to workers or users communities (the case here analyzed) in order to better represent the general interest. Nevertheless, numerous challenges hinder this approach, for example the scarcity of financial resources that make for the consortia hard to cover the service’s expenses.
In conclusion, it can be argued that these alternative solutions demonstrate that – in certain instances – a communitarian management of the water resource could be more efficient than a rigid assignment of property rights to private operators or to the State. Nevertheless, the outcome of the “in common solution” depends on the awareness of the relative community, on its willingness to participate, and on its capacity to respect common rules.
[1] Interview with Andrei Jouravlev at the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe – CEPAL.
[2] Hardin, G.. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, New Series, Vol. 162, No. 3859, pp. 1243-1248. Available at http://www.geo.mtu.edu/~asmayer/rural_sustain/governance/Hardin%201968.pdf.
[3] Segerfeldt, F. 2011. Acqua in vendita? (2003), trad.it. Torino: IBL, p.52.
[4] Santi, F. 2011. Amministrazione e controlli. Società di persone. Imprese gestite da enti collettivi. Consorzi. Gruppi europei di interesse economico. Imprese Famigliari, Associazioni in partecipazione. Padova: Cedam.
[5] Massarutto, A. 2011. Privati dell’Acqua? Bologna: Il Mulino, p.115.
[6] Ambiti Territoriali Ottimali are territorial subdivisions for water management and were created by the Law “Galli” of 1994. Legge 5 gennaio 1994 n.36, G.U. n.14 del 19-1-1994.
Il presente articolo illustra l’esperienza dei consorzi italiani per la gestione del sistema idrico. La relazione di proporzionalità inversa tra la dimensione della comunità di riferimento e il grado di riuscita della gestione in comune della risorsa idrica viene discussa. Alcuni esempi in Europa ed in Italia di consorzi di gestione in comune dell’acqua vengono presentati. Segue una riflessione sulle sfide che il mercato e gli interessi politici presentano all’approccio comunitario. In conclusione, si auspica l’adozione e la preservazione di tale approccio, tuttavia tenendo presente il necessario sussistere di alcune condizioni, come per esempio la capacità della collettività di auto-porsi limiti e regole.
by Chiara De Angelis | Oct 23, 2017 | The Urban Media Lab
On October 24th and 25th, Milan is going to host ICityLab 2017 “Towards a sustainable city”, the annual FPA meeting focused on cities, sponsored by the Municipality of Milan.
The opening of the meeting will be dedicated to the presentation of ICity Rate, the first FPA annual report that draws a ranking of Italian Smart Cities in relation twith the objectives of sustainable development proposed by the ONU 2030 Agenda.The report will help us to understand where are we in relation to those objectives: the results of the research will be presented during the first meeting, held in the innovative spaces of BASE Milano, on Tuesday, October 24th from 10 AM.
Gianni Dominici, FPA General Director, explains that Milan has benn chosen because it is actually the city that is working more than the others in the logic of an “urban lab“, focusing on all the actors of the city.
The program provides 40 sessions in two days: conventions, labs and working tables where local entities, public administrations, innovative entreprises, local actors, the third sector and representatives of the active citizenship will participate actively. The themes of the events will focus on policies and platforms for civic participation and civic crowdfunding, tools for urban regeneration and re-use of public spazes, digital innovation for the city, the new borders of 4.0 manifacture, big data and IOT, participatory budgenting and so on.
LabGov’s co-founder Christian Iaione is going to attend the meeting, and in particular:
– the convention dedicated to “Regenerating the cities: a national perspective“. The focus is going to be on the national and international measures taken by the Italian government and the EU to answer the local needs of a participated solution to the re-use of spaces. The meeting will be held on Wednesday, 25th from 9.30 AM to 11.30 AM, in Sala 2;
– the convention on “Innovative and circular Procurements“, fundamental elements when speaking about innovation processes and urban Living Labs. The meeting will be held on Wednesday, 25th from 11.45 AM to 13.45 AM, in Sala 1
The full program of the event is available on the official website: http://icitylab2017.eventifpa.it/
Milano ospiterà il 24 e 25 ottobre ICityLab 2017, “Verso una città sostenibile”, l’appuntamento nazionale sulle città organizzato da FPA, quest’anno con il patrocinio del Comune di Milano.
Il programma dell’evento è disponibile a questo link: http://icitylab2017.eventifpa.it/
by Alessia Palladino | Oct 9, 2017 | The Urban Media Lab
Mobility represents a fundamental right, intimately tied to the quality of life in cities, hamlets and suburbs, occupying a large portion of the community’s land.
In this regard, the increase expected by 2050 of over 66% (compared to 54% in 2014) of the world population that will reside in cities must be taken into account. Indeed, people living in urban areas spend a considerable amount of time on public transportation, as stated by a current, exentsive study, carried out by Ipsos and the Boston Consulting Group in ten of the major European Union countries, looking at transport infrastructure.
The research shows that:
- a European citizen employes, on average, 9 hours and 35 minutes to move every week;
- there is a strong car dependence, which is the mean of transport mainly used.
The European citizens seem to be, overall, quite satisfied of the single infrastructures of mobility as the railroads, the road net, the system of public transportation, but they are very dissatisfied instead of the level of interconnection existing among these infrastructures. Furthermore, currently transportation systems lack efficiency, facing up new – bottom up – needs required.
Neverthless, transportation is often used to be centered on private vehicles. This choice, however, does not result very efficient: from a user’s perspective, it usually provides limited transportation options, but it also leads to severe congestion and considerable gas expenses, especially in densely populated urban areas, due to traffic jams, lack of parking space and high costs due to increasing fuel prices[1].
These concerns, as can be seen, are too crucial to be ignored[2]. Improving roads could ease temporarily congestion levels; however, the study of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre found no significant impacts on reducing congestion.
In this regard, a truly sustainable mobility system should be necessary; it needs a virtuous circle, produced by investments in infrastructures more interconnected, in a way which provides local, regional and inter-regional accessibility at an affordable cost to families and businesses, while serving community needs for social and economic exchange.
This goal, however, couldn’t be achieved without a change of approach (even methodological) by both public spheres and community, supported by the development of the new technologies as an important contribution to road safety too. Transportation, in conclusion, shouldn’t just be considered as a goal in and of itself, but as a wider powerful tool, useful for the development of livable, productive, equitable and healthy communities, in accordance with the new and more active role played by community.
Transportation, as well as pollution, road congestion and many other concerns mentioned above, constitute issues not only related to the European framework, because they also affect the American landscape.
In view of the above, many American and European initiatives can be mentioned, respectively encouraging projects among Departments of Transportation, Community Partnership Program and citizen awareness, even to ensure cities would remain a desirable place to live.
The first illustrative initiative, above all, is the development of Smart Transportation. Namely, the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Departments of Transportation partnered in the development of the Smart Transportation Guidebook in 2008. It achieved to integrate the planning and design of streets and highways in order to foster the development of sustainable and livable communities.
In this regard, the concept of Smart transportation was taken into account: it means incorporating both financial and environmental constraints, community needs and aspirations, land use, as a new approach to planning and designing roadways. Thus, transportation investments should be tailored to the specific needs of each project, while the adequate determination of solution’s design is measured case by case, pursuant to the whole financial, community, land use, transportation, and environmental context.
Better transportation solutions, however, are considered as a result of a deeper process involving a multi-disciplinary team, considering a wide range of solutions, works closely with the community. Smart Transportation also encompasses network connectivity, and access and corridor management. It would help both states and communities to adapt to the new financial context of constrained resources.
This initiative, however, sheds light upon the new role of DOTs, which have to support Vibrant Communities into the delivery of transportation projects. This goal was a key concept of the project Building Projects that build Communities, carried out by the Washington State Department of Transportation in 2003.
Even if DOTs are faced with economic, health, environmental and social challenges, they can’t effectively support many communities’ programme, as active transportation, defined as humanpowered modes of transportation, involving walking and bicycling, but also skate boarding, canoeing, roller-skating. In these cases, DOTs’ responsibility is often restricted in many states to the state highway network, so their efforts to support active transportation is limited to the state network.
Besides these initiatives, closely related to infrastructures, EU institutions aim at raising and fostering citizen awareness, through rewards, on the quality of the urban environment where people live, in order to promote a shift towards more sustainable and healthy mobility choices. In this regard, technologies have an essential role[3].
MUV – Mobility Urban Values – is a Research and Innovation Action funded by the European Commission under the call Horizon2020 MG-4.5-2016.
The MUV system will result from the combination of:
- behavioural change techniques;
- new technologies;
- data science;
- co-design approaches.
The solution will include a mobile app, which will track users’ daily routes and assign points for sustainable behaviours and a network of sensing stations designed by the makers’ community. Urban commuters, from a set of six different urban neighbourhoods, spread across Europe, will co-create and then test different game dynamics; finally, their achievements will be rewarded by a network of local businesses that will benefit from the advertising provided by the MUV platform.
The methodology used reflects the Gamification, ICT and data science to translate people’s needs into new sustainable mobility solutions.
Mobility and environmental data are gathered via the mobile app and the monitoring stations; they are all released as Open Data: data visualization can simplify complex information about urban mobility and support decision making; it will allow policymakers to enhance planning processes and civic hackers to build new services able to improve cities’ quality of life in a more effective way.
In particular, the MUV solution will be open, co-created with a strong learning community of users and stakeholders and piloted in six different European neighbourhoods:
- Buitenveldert in Amsterdam;
- Sant Andreu in Barcelona;
- the historic district of the Portuguese county of Fundao;
- Muide-Meulestede in the harbour of Ghent;
- the new area of Jätkäsaari in Helsinki;
- the area of the Historic Centre in Palermo.
This approach will allow to reach specific objectives, as understanding the neighborhoods’ peculiarities and emerging values to define an effective behavior change strategy. Co-designing site-specific solutions will foster better and more liveable urban environments, developing scalable digital solutions and technologies to improve globally the experience of urban mobility, integrating new co-created mobility solutions into urban policy-making and planning processes at neighborhood level.
Raising awareness among citizens on the importance of sustainable and healthy mobility choices could be a successful approach to reduce private vehicular traffic and its negative externalities, encouraging local consumption. In this regard, MUV builds on the experience of trafficO2, an Italian research-action project co-funded in 2012 by a grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and carried out by PUSH – MUV’s Project Coordinator – in the city of Palermo in the last three years. The experimentation involved 2.000 students of the University of Palermo and a network of 100 local businesses, and showed a reduction of the carbon emissions associated to the active users of more than 40%.
Data and sharing mobility and environmental data to build an effective decision support system for multiple stakeholders, bringing the whole experiment to the market through an innovative business model in order to improve urban transportation in crowded neighborhoods and cities all over the world. This research embrace a model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation, but it also raises the question of data ownership and sovereignty.
La mobilità ricopre un ruolo fondamentale nella vita di ogni cittadino. La crescita demografica, l’inquinamento e la congestione, nonché la diffusione delle nuove tecnologie, inducono un ripensamento degli ordinari approcci in materia, ma soprattutto del rapporto tra il pubblico e i cittadini.
[1] Sahami Shirazi, Alireza & Kubitza, Thomas & Alt, Florian & Pfleging, Bastian & Schmidt, Albrecht, WEtransport: a context-based ride sharing platform. 425-426 (2010), doi 10.1145/1864431.1864469.
[2] C. Iaione, The tragedy of urban roads: Saving Cities from Choking, Calling on Citizens to Combat Climate Change, 37 Fordham Urb. L.J. 889 (2009).
[3] Zhang Z., Beibei L., A quasi experimental Estimate of the Impact of P2P Transportation Platforms on Urban Consumer Patterns, in Proceedings of KDD ’17, August 13-17, 2017, Halifax, NS, Canada, , 9 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3097983.3098058.
by Fabiana Bettini | Sep 6, 2017 | The Urban Media Lab
Granby Community Land Trust (Credits © Ronnie Hughes)
In most European countries long-term housing affordability and neighbourhood revitalisation are emerging as crucial concerns in the current housing political and policy agenda. Local authorities in several European cities have started to recognise the importance of supporting and funding collaborative housing projects as a strategy to meet the unsatisfied demand of social housing accommodation and to reinforce community empowerment. In particular, the Community Land Trust model has started to draw the attention of local and national authorities, for it is capable of both ensuring housing affordability and promoting urban regeneration.
As already described in a previous article, Community Land Trust is a membership-based, non-profit organisation chartered to hold and manage land in trust for the benefit of a given community. The main feature of the CLT model is the possibility to realise a split in the ownership of land and improvements. The CLT retains title to the land and permanently removes it from the market, while entering into long-term agreements with prospective low- or moderate-income residents, who become the owners of the improvements. In addition, the existence of a tripartite board of directors, which includes representatives of residents, members of the CLT community, and members of the public, ensure a democratic governance of the CLT.
In the United States, CLTs have a long history. One of the oldest and most acclaimed CLT in the US, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston, dates back to 1984, and hundreds of others have been built throughout the country since then. Recently, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) has issued a Request for Expressions of Interest (RFEI) to identify qualified groups who are interested in forming a CLT, thus showing an increased attention by local policymakers.
In Europe, the CLT model has already gained recognition in several countries, both at a grassroots and legal level, often in collaboration with local or central governments. This is the case for England and Wales, where the Housing & Regeneration Act 2008 has legally recognised CLT and defined it as a corporate body whose main goal is to acquire and manage land for the benefit of the local community[1]. Following the formal introduction of CLT into the English legal landscape, a National CLT Network was established in 2010 and it then became an officially registered charity in 2014. The Network “provides funding, resources, training and advice for CLTs and works with Government, local authorities, lenders and funders to establish the best conditions for CLTs to grow and flourish”[2]. According to the National CLT Network, there are almost 70 CLTs in England and Wales, although the level of accomplishment of the projects varies substantially. Among them, the London CLT dates back to 2007 and is probably the most renowned and iconic example of CLT in England.
CLT projects in England and Wales (Credit © National CLT Network)
Although the implementation of the CLT model is recent, a supportive political agenda, the lobbying by the CLT network, and a property law tradition that is common to the UK and the US, have helped it to take roots and flourish throughout England and Wales.
By contrast, the implementation of the CLT model in civil law countries has been less straightforward. Despite a considerable amount of support from grassroots movements, a different conception of property law and the consequent absence of proper legal structures for CLT have slowed down its process of recognition. Among civil law countries, Belgium has offered the first example of implementation of a CLT in continental Europe. The Ecluse project in Brussels, inaugurated in September 2015, is the outcome of an intense collaboration and exchange between local associations, citizens, and the Brussels government. In particular, the strong support by the Brussels government and the legal recognition of the CLT Bruxelles (CLTB) in the Brussels Housing Code in 2012 (as a non-profit association and a public utility foundation) represented the crucial stage for the implementation of the CLT model in the region[3]. In particular, in the framework of the Alliance Habitat regional governmental plan for increasing the social housing stock, the Brussels government have allocated 2 million euros per year to CLTB for the 2014-2017 period. Actually, in addition to L’Ecluse project, CLTB has planned to complete three other projects (Arc-en-Ciel, Le Nid, and Lumière du Nord) by the end of 2018, while three more have just got started in the past few years (Rue Liedts, Transvaal, and Tivoli). Three other projects are currently under study and evaluation.
CLT projects in Brussels (Credits © Community Land Trust Bruxelles – Brussel)
In the wake of the successful implementation of CLTs in England and Brussels, the interest for the CLT model has risen in France. At the end of 2013, the association Community Land Trust France “Pour un foncier solidaire” was created to promote the principles and values of CLT, and to adapt them to the French context, while at the same time increasing awareness among groups and landowners[4]. Since then, CLT France has regularly taken part in the working group headed by the Ministère du logement et de l’habitat, and contributed to the adoption of new legal structures to implement CLT in France.
(Credits © Community Land Trust France – Pour un foncier solidaire)
On the basis of the results of this consultation phase, the Loi ALUR 2014 introduced the Organismes de foncier solidaire (OFS) in the Code de l’urbanisme[5]. OFS are non-profit organisms whose activity is totally or partially devoted to the acquisition and management of improved or unimproved building land, and whose main goal is to provide affordable collective housing and related services to be rented out or sold to income-qualified people. Since the main feature of the OFS, which are based on the CLT model, is a split in the ownership of land and improvements, the adoption of a new type of lease was supported by CLTF, and finally approved by an ordonnance in July 2016[6]. The legal discipline of the bail reel solidaire (BRS), which is meant to be primarily used by the OFS, is now included in the Code de la construction et de l’habitation (CCH)[7]. Very recently, a series of decrees have provided a more detailed regulatory framework for the practical operation of OFS[8] and BRS[9], so removing the remaining obstacles to the implementation of CLT in France. Following these substantial changes in the French legal landscape, CLT projects are likely to flourish in the coming years.
References
[1] More precisely, CLT is defined in Part 2, Chapter 1 of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008 (c. 17).
[2] http://www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk/about-the-network/what-we-do.
[3] https://communitylandtrust.wordpress.com/notre-histoire/
[4] Cfr the press release issued after the association was created, available at http://www.communitylandtrust.fr/clt-en-france–c1/creation-de-l-association-clt-france–66
[5] Cfr article L. 329-1, Code de l’urbanisme.
[6] Ordonnance n° 2016-985 du 20 juillet 2016, art 1er-2°.
[7] CCH, articles L. 255-1 to L. 255-19.
[8] Cfr Décret n°2016-1215 du 12 septembre 2016 and décret n°2017-1037 du 10 mai 2017.
[9] Cfr Décret n° 2017-1038 du 10 mai 2017.
Nell’ultimo decennio il modello americano del Community Land Trust ha attecchito e si è diffuso in numerosi paesi europei grazie all’introduzione di nuovi strumenti giuridici, al supporto delle associazioni CLT e al finanziamento dei governi locali e centrali. In Inghilterra e in Galles, dove il CLT è stato introdotto nell’Housing and Regeneration Act 2008, si contano circa 70 progetti coordinati da un forte network nazionale. In Belgio, nella regione di Bruxelles, l’associazione CLT Bruxelles ha ottenuto cospicui finanziamenti dal governo locale e può vantare la realizzazione del primo CLT dell’Europa continentale, oltre a una decina di ulteriori progetti in fase di completamento e di studio. In Francia, grazie alle pressioni esercitate dall’associazione CLT France, una serie di importanti riforme ha recentemente introdotto nuovi strumenti giuridici, quali organismes de foncier solidaire e bail réel solidaire, che mirano a facilitare l’introduzione del modello.
