Co-City Turin

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Description

1.

"The City of Turin is leading one of the 18 projects approved in the first Urban Innovative Actions call. The CO-CITY Project aims at contrasting urban poverty through the rehabilitation of abandoned spaces and underused structures and fostering the active participation of residents in different neighborhoods.

The project will be officially presented on 31 March with an event which will be a decisive milestone in the national debate on the use of urban commons to promote integrated and sustainable urban development. The event, held in Open Incet (the Open Innovation Centre of Turin), will involve national and international experts of commons management, in order to inspire citizens with visions and practices emerged at national and global level which could be replicated in Turin along the project."


2. Christian Iaione:

"The Co-City project pursues the transformation of abandoned structures and vacant land in hubs of neighborhoods residents’ participation in order to foster community spirit as well as the creation of social and solidarity entrepreneurial activities contributing to the reduction urban poverty in economically distressed areas of the city. It does so by implementing “pacts of collaboration” pursuant to the Regulation on the urban commons. These “pacts of collaboration” between residents or associations and city departments focus in most cases on the civic maintenance of public spaces or on the civic reuse of abandoned urban spaces and structures. The creation of new forms of commons-based urban welfare will promote social mixing and cohesion within local community, transforming residents into actors of urban development while the local authority acts as facilitator of an innovation process already ongoing in the urban context.

The use of innovative ICT platforms, such as the urban social network First Life under development by the University of Turin, and the active collaboration of the network of the Neighborhood Houses (Case del Quartiere) is contributing to combine the virtual and physical dimension, involving different types of users in the central areas of the city as well as in the suburbs in this wide action of urban regeneration to fight poverty and social exclusion.

The regeneration of abandoned or underused spaces in different areas of the city aims at contributing to the creation of new jobs in the social economy sector through the possible establishment of entrepreneurial activities leveraging residents’ participation triggered and facilitated by the city of Turin together with the network of the Neighborhoods Houses. The definition and the implementation of several pacts of collaboration will improve the participation of residents in different parts of the city, fostering the commitment of the citizens towards a more inclusive and cohesive city." (https://iris.luiss.it/retrieve/handle/11385/195371/98299/The%20Co-City%20project%20-%20journal%205.pdf)


Executive summary

"Through the Co-City project on collaborative management of urban commons to counteract poverty and socio-spatial polarization that started in mid-2017, the City is investing in the urban commons as a lever for addressing key urban governance issues such as poverty, aiming to target the most vulnerable of the city’s communities. The UIA Co-City project is carried out through a partnership with the Computer Science Department and Law School of the University of Turin, the National Association of Municipalities (ANCI) and the Cascina Roccafranca Foundation as the of the leaders of the Neighborhood Houses Network. It aims at coordinating the efforts of different urban actors in promoting the implementation of the Turin Regulation. The project provides the renewal of real estate and public spaces considered as urban commons, as an instrument of social inclusion and part of the fight against poverty in many of the deprived areas of the City. The project is coordinated by the City Department for Decentralization, Youth and Equal Opportunities. The Neighborhood Houses is a policy and network the city of Turin has been implementing since 2006 to promote the diffusion of community spaces all over the city represent a key platform for the project’s implementation. In the Neighborhood Houses Network, city inhabitants find information on the Co-City project and the different opportunities it offers. They will find there the necessary support for drafting proposals of pacts of collaboration as well as the opportunity to meet other city inhabitants interested in cooperating in taking care of or regenerating these same urban commons.

The first Co-City journal, published in January 2018 (available at http://www.uiainitiative.eu/en/cocity-journal-1-hear-projects-uia-expert-how-it-implementing-its-bold-solution) retraced the overall architecture of the project and provided an overview of the challenges posed by its implementation to the City of Turin.

The second UIA Co-City journal, published in June 2018 (available at https://www.uia-initiative.eu/sites/default/files/2018-06/Turin_01-051%20CoCity_Christian%20Iaione_Journal%202_June%202018.pdf) thoroughly looked into the results of the calls for proposals for pacts of collaboration and the first steps carried out by the City of Turin in the pacts’ co-design phase. The journal also provides an update on the other project’s activities that are tackling the challenge of innovation of public procurement at the local level: the participation of the City of Turin and the UIA expert Christian Iaione to the Urban Partnership of the Urban Agenda for the EU on Innovative and Responsible Public Procurement and the process of learning and exchange activated at the Italian level.

The third UIA Co-City Journal, published in February 2019 (available at https://www.uia-initiative.eu/sites/default/files/2019-02/Turin-CO-City-Journal%203_0.pdf) provides an update on the project’s activities at the local, national and EU level and takes a deeper look at the basket of pacts of collaboration that are more advanced at this stage of the process. A first zoom-in has analyzed empirically and in depth the proposals of pacts of collaboration (available at https://www.uia-initiative.eu/en/uia-cities/turin).

The fourth Journal, published in September 2019 (available at: https://www.uiainitiative.eu/sites/default/files/2019-10/Turin_COCITY_Journal%204.pdf) has shed light on the ways in which the Co-City Turin project has been making impactful progress at the local, national and EU level. At the local level, the first pacts of collaboration were officially approved.


This fifth journal will provide for the reader, updates on the main news surrounding the project. It will contain an update of the pacts of collaboration, specifically the recently approved pact of collaboration “Via Cumiana”. The Via Cumiana pact is the very first pact of the category “A”, involving the regeneration of building, to be activated. A new version of the Regulation for the Urban Commons, updated building on the knowledge generated by the Co-City project was issued by the City in December 2019 (an upcoming Zoom-in will be dedicated exclusively to the new Regulation’s analysis). At the national level the Co-City project is offering an important contribution to the debate between cities and national institutions such as ANCI in terms of the importance of conducting urban experimentations through innovative forms of partnership and public procurement. At the international level, the City of Turin’s participation to the Urban Agenda for the EU through the Urban Partnership on Innovative and Responsible Public Procurement is working in the direction positioning the pacts of collaboration as the first generation of urban innovation partnerships.

The final steps of the Co-City Turin project will go in the direction of accompanying the projects realized through the Pact of collaboration towards their first phase of implementation. At the same time, the Co-City project team will work to ensure that the knowledge and policy capacity on governance of urban commons produced is transferred to another UIA project is about to start in Turin, “To-Nite”. The project aims at improving the livability of the areas along the Dora river through the improvement of public spaces and the activation of social inclusion processes with the technical and financial support of new welfare proximity services."


Partnership:

1. Comune di Torino – City of Turin. 2. Università degli Studi di Torino - University 3. Fondazione Cascina Roccafranca – NGO 4. ANCI - Associazione Nazionale Comuni Italiani - National Association of Italian Cities

More information

  • The scoping paper “Urban Innovation Partnerships. Unleashing the Potential of Public – Community

and Public – Private - Community Cooperation” available in the Co-City Turin project library (see https://www.uia-initiative.eu/en/uia-cities/turin) has kicked of an UIA capitalization effort on Public Procurement.

To deliver this pilot action the main steps and deliverables of the process were:

1. On the basis of a literature and policy documents’ analysis, draft of a scoping paper;

2. Identification and data collection through semi-structured interviews and documents analysis of UIA projects that are relevant with respect to the content of the scoping paper – June / July 2019.

3. Draft of an orientation paper including an analysis of a basket of the selected projects (including co-design meeting with selected cities) – September/November 2019;

4. Public presentation of main results (Co-City final conference, including a thematic session on the pilot with selected cities: Athens, Barcelona, Birmingham) - February 2020.


A summary of the orientation paper’s results has been briefly outlined in the following paragraphs (a more detailed review of the theoretical framework is included in the UIA Co-City fourth journal)."