Turin’s Tavolo Tecnico: Inter-departmental cooperation for the commons

A Pact of collaboration is a negotiation between the city administration and civil subjects through which the regeneration, care and co–management of urban commons is defined and carried out. Since 2016, the Turin Municipality has signed over 60 Pacts of collaboration, supported by the municipality’s “Tavolo Tecnico” (Technical Board) that acts as a forum to […]

The promotion of the commons in Naples: from self-organisation to co-governance

The city of Naples (Italy)[1] is an exemplary case study of how a city can co-design legal and sustainable urban commons governance mechanisms and enable city inhabitants and local communities to act collectively in the general interest. In 2011, the City of Naples enabled the activity of a network of local communities in Naples that […]

COOPERATIVE CITY IN QUARANTINE #6: Urban commons

Urban Commons are all those spaces, services and resources that are directly managed by local communities for their wellbeing. Taking care of such common goods isn’t only beneficial for the immediate needs of the citizens – in fact, urban commons can play a crucial role in building a more cohesive – and inclusive – society. […]

Complementary currencies for a commons-based economy

Responses to the economic crisis of 2007-2008, and ambitions to create autonomous systems of exchange generated hundreds of complementary currencies in the past decade. Created to connect local actors, help local businesses or assure financial transparency, mutual credit systems, convertible local currencies and cryptocurrencies have evolved into mechanisms used not only in socio-economic experiments, but […]

Regulating the Urban Commons – What we can learn from Italian experiences

The international debate on the commons has a long history but only in recent years has it started gearing towards the definition of Urban Commons and what their role is in shaping our society, especially at the wake of the economic crisis. This debate developed strongly in Italy as a result of a referendum refusing […]

Measuring social return: The case of the community centre Can Battló

Like other major European cities, Barcelona has a great industrial heritage that can now be re-used for a new and different development of its urban life, regenerating spaces, places and communities. The former Can Batlló factory, a post-industrial infrastructure in La Bordeta neighbourhood of the Sants district, is part of this industrial heritage. Due to […]

Gradual space: Room for Diversity in the Future of Urban Public Spaces

Article by Levente Polyak for publicspace.org, a project by the CCCB. In 1748, the Italian architect Giambattista Nolli published an ichnographic plan of Rome, documenting every building in the city and their adjacent spaces. The Pianta Grande di Roma, besides outlining all the buildings, and separating them from the surrounding public spaces, also depicted publicly […]

Public procurement with social impact

Local communities and their local governments have two possible ways to cooperate. One is centred upon the use of public procurement for social purposes. The second is based on new forms of partnerships. The perspective of new types of partnerships that overcome the public-private binary and allow new forms of public-community or public-private-community collaboration is […]

Kultura Nova: Supporting networks in the field of culture

Kultura Nova is a public foundation promoting civil society organisations in the field of contemporary arts and culture. The foundation was established in 2011, when the Croatian parliament adopted the Law on Kultura Nova Foundation. The idea of this new institution was born among non-governmental associations that work in the fields of arts and culture […]

New Book: The Power of Civic Ecosystems

The Power of Civic Ecosystems: How community spaces and their networks make our cities more cooperative, fair and resilient Public-civic cooperation has never been as important for European cities as today. Fading trust between public administrations and the civic society, rising authoritarianism and deteriorating services all make urban life more burdensome, especially for the most […]

The Power of Civic Ecosystems

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 (Eutropian – Cooperating for Urban Justice) Design by Jorge Mosquera Suárez Publisher: Cooperative City Books, Vienna, June 2021 Format: Paper size B5, 320 pages ISBN 978-3-9504409-2-8 […]

Gamification and new scenarios for digital participation: tools and methods

Living and working in times of physical distancing and – sometimes forced – digitalisation cannot always be about video meetings via Zoom, Skype or other similar platforms. Or at least, we should not limit ourselves to these kinds of interactions. The Eutropian team, as many other researchers and practitioners in the field of urban studies, […]

Medialab Prado: a hub for social innovation

Medialab Prado is a citizen laboratory that functions as a meeting place for the production of open cultural projects. It is a cultural space and citizen lab in Madrid. It was created by the Madrid City Council in 2000, growing since then into a leading centre for citizen innovation. The Medialab’s activities are structured in […]

Busy as bees: A rooftop garden and a dynamic community hub for social integration – BeeOzanam in Turin

BeeOzanam is a community hub whose challenge is to combat cultural poverty and social exclusion, stimulating the growth of a sustainable generation through the co-production of cultural, educational and aggregative activities. Following the deindustrialisation of the city of Turin, several workers’ districts scattered across the city generated many empty spaces that were once factories, workshops […]

Expert Perspectives on Urban Resilience in the Face of Pandemics

Interview with Daniela Patti, Director of Eutropian by the European Urban Knowledge Network. How can we prepare for and cope with crisis situations in dense urban settings?   It is evident that the current COVID-19 pandemic is causing critical damage in both physical and psychological terms to all fields of life.  We are living through […]

Cooperative City in Quarantine: Connecting local initiatives during the COVID-19 crisis

Realising the need to create international dialogue on handling the COVID-19 crisis at the local level, Eutropian launched a weekly webinar to connect activists and experts from all parts of Europe with a broader audience. On a Sunday evening in early March, I received a few text messages. It was 8 March, and I was […]

Welcome to Cooperative City

What is the Magazine about? Cooperative City Magazine brings its readers the stories of collaborative urban development processes in different areas in Europe. It is a project run by Eutropian, a company and association developing collaborative planning processes in various cities in Europe. Latest Article More articles Explore more articles The Cooperative City Webinars Placemaking […]

Cooperative City in Quarantine #14: Manifesto – Planning post-Covid cities

During the first weeks of the lockdown we noticed that there was little or no exchange across nations about how to respond to the emerging crisis. This is why we launched Cooperative City in Quarantine, bridging this gap and brought together lots of people from different backgrounds and countries to contribute to the discussion. We […]

Cooperative City webinars

#2 Placemaking at the street-level We discuss how tactical urbanism, notably street-level experiments can lead to systemic sustainable transition at the city-level. Watch video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcvbk-zpET4 #1 Circular Economy The first episode of the webinar series Cooperative Urban Futures discusses cooperation at city level for various stakeholders in building a local ecosystem.  Watch video https://youtu.be/NX6ga7BPPyA #6 […]

Cooperative City in Quarantine #6: BENI COMUNI – IT

  I beni comuni urbani (Urban Commons) sono tutti quegli spazi, servizi e risorse che favoriscono il benessere delle comunità locali e sono gestiti da queste in modo diretto. Prendersi cura di questi beni di comunità vuol dire aiutare i cittadini e le cittadine, che vedono soddisfatte le loro esigenze immediate. I beni comuni possono […]

Co-Hab Athens: changing the ownership paradigm in Athens

Co-Hab Athens is a research project which aims to elaborate long-term models of collective housing ownership, claiming the quality of housing as a right. Active since January 2016, it aspires to act as an exchange platform for urban researchers and activists on the issue of collective ownership, to propose new policies and to promote the […]

Cascina Roccafranca: The journey from farmhouse to community centre

Cascina Roccafranca is a multi-functional community center located in a former farmstead in Turin’s outskirts. After 30 years of vacancy, Cascina Roccafranca was bought by the Municipality of Turin and requalified with the support of the European Union Urban II program. Today, Cascina Roccafranca is a public asset managed through a cooperation between public and civic actors and it provides a wide range of social and cultural activities. Since 2012, Cascina Roccafranca has been part of a network of similar community centers in Turin which was formalized in 2017, and today collaborates with the City Council in the management and the regeneration of urban commons.

Social Solidarity Economy in Barcelona: The Ecos Cooperative

Ecos is a cooperative of cooperatives which works to support the growth of single cooperatives and to promote inter-cooperatives projects in Barcelona. In this article, we share what we learned from Roger, the coordinator of Ecos, and Guernica, a member of the organisation, who explained us how does social solidarity economy work in Barcelona and […]

There’s more to Digital Democracy than just a tweet

The US presidential election results came as a surprise to many of us especially because we hadn’t encountered any testament of sweeping support towards the current president in any of our communication channels. None of our friends on Facebook seemed to support Trump, so how could he be elected? Recent public discussions have highlighted the […]

Funding the Cooperative City PDF

Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces Edited by Daniela Patti & Levente Polyák (Eutropian Research & Action) Publisher: Cooperative City Books, Vienna, September 2017 Format: Paper size B5, 244 pages ISBN 978-3-9504409-0-4 The book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) More information: info@cooperativecity.org Please […]

Funding the Cooperative City

Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces Edited by Daniela Patti & Levente Polyák (Eutropian Research & Action) Publisher: Cooperative City Books, Vienna, September 2017 Format: Paper size B5, 244 pages ISBN 978-3-9504409-0-4 The book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) More information: info@cooperativecity.org Please […]

Stad in de Maak – From crisis to a shared ownership model

Stad in de Maak is an association set up to take on the redevelopment of vacant properties in Central Rotterdam, together with the local community. The association renovated six buildings, investing upfront the amount of loss the buildings were projected to generate for their owner, a housing corporation, in the coming 10 years. Stad in […]

Exploring property: Perspectives of ownership

In the last decades, ownership has become a key factor of our societies and economies. As Thomas Piketty demonstrated in his recent book Capital in the Twenty First Century, the late 20th and early 21st centuries witnessed the return of the primacy of wealth over work in economic benefits and ownership has become an increasingly […]

Rákóczi Collective – Alternatives to individual homeownership

In 2011 a dozen young people retreated for a weekend to one of the suburbs of Hungary’s capital to discuss the alternatives of individual home-ownership, and to sketch the contours of a possible model of co-housing. By Ágnes Gagyi, Csaba Jelinek, Zsuzsanna Pósfai and Márton Szarvas for Autoportret Magazine Images by Community Living initiative

Goteo – Crowdsourcing for open communities

Goteo is a platform for civic crowdfunding founded by Platoniq, a Catalan association of culture producers and software developers. Goteo helps citizen initiatives as well as social, cultural and technological projects that produce open source results and community benefits, with crowdfunding and crowdsourcing resources. Since its launch in 2011, Goteo’s crowdfunding campaigns have mobilised more […]

Funding the Cooperative City

Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces
Edited by Daniela Patti & Levente Polyák
Eutropian Research & Action
Cooperative City Books, Vienna, 2017
ISBN 978-3-9504409-0-4
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
For more information visit https://cooperativecity.org/funding-the-cooperative-city/

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Funding the Cooperative City explores how citizen initiatives, cooperatives, non-profit companies, community land trusts, crowdfunding platforms, ethical banks and anti-speculation foundations step out of the regular dynamisms of real estate development and arrange new mechanisms to access, purchase, renovate or construct buildings for communities. Through interviews and analyses, this book describes tendencies and contexts, and presents stories and models of community finance and civic economy. It offers a helpful set of resources not only for community organisations and initiators of civic spaces, but also for private developers, municipalities and EU institutions that are willing to support, facilitate or cooperate with them in order to create more resilient and inclusive local communities, facilities and services.

Stiftung Trias – Taking properties out of the speculation market

Stiftung trias was established in 2002, to help community groups and co-housing projects access financing. Trias takes land off the market by separating the ownership of land and buildings: supported initiatives lease the land from the foundation in the form of a long-term Heritable Building Right (Erbbaurecht) and their lease fee is collected in a mutual […]

LaFabrika detodalavida – Revitalising a rural area

LaFabrika detodalavida is a multifunctional community centre in Los Santos de Maimona in Extremadura (ES), that offers a series of local services to its rural community, such as cultural events, music, construction spaces and most importantly gathering venues. For renovating a derelict industrial site, the crowdfunding campaign of LaFabrika detodalavida on the Goteo platform reached […]

Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces

Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces Edited by Daniela Patti & Levente Polyák (Eutropian Research & Action) Publisher: Cooperative City Books, Vienna, 2017 Format: Paper size B5, 244 pages Publication date: September 2017 ISBN 978-3-9504409-0-4 The book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) More […]

Community Capital in Action: New Financial Models for Resilient Cities

In the past decade, with the economic crisis and the transformation of welfare societies, NGOs, community organisations and civic developers – City Makers – established some of the most important services and spaces in formerly vacant buildings, underused areas and neglected neighbourhoods. Consolidating their presence in the regenerated spaces, these initiatives are increasingly looking into […]

Build the City

The 26 practices highlighted in this publication are civil-public partnerships based on principles of the commons – enabling citizens and governments to share power, co-design and co-shape legislation, management or collective action for the common good. Magazine curated by the European Cultural Foundation.

Accommodating innovation: temporary use and the access to vacant urban properties in Europe

Temporary use is a learning process of accommodating innovation and adapting needs and capacities to available resources. It offers benefits to owners and users, in terms of security, maintenance, anchor tenants and social vibe on the one side, and affordable rents and spaces on the other. And it can help shaping new forms of cooperation […]