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ExRotaprint: From industrial production to collective urban development

ExRotaprint was founded in 2007 by tenants of the former Rotaprint industrial complex located in Wedding, a traditional working-class district in central Berlin. ExRotaprint set up a legal configuration comprising a heritable building right and non-profit status in order to buy the complex put up for sale by the Berlin Municipality’s Real Estate Fund. Established by the tenants ExRotaprint became owner of the 10,000 m2 complex and started a non-profit real estate development project setting a precedent in Berlin that inspired many experiments in cooperative ownership and a campaign to change the city’s privatisation policy. ExRotaprint offers affordable rents to small businesses, artists and social projects.

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Färgfabriken: From producing paint to producing culture

Färgfabriken is a platform and exhibition venue for contemporary cultural expressions, with an emphasis on art, architecture and urban planning established in an industrial building built in 1889. The building previously accommodated a paint factory, from which it also borrowed its name. Since its creation, Färgfabriken has not only become a key cultural institution in Stockholm, but has also pioneered a model of building inclusive, participatory processes through art and dialogue. Färgfabriken has a great impact on the development of the surrounding area and on the inclusion of a great variety of stakeholders in decision-making processes.

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London Community Land Trust: Creating communities through affordable housing

London’s first Community Land Trust was established in the former psychiatric hospital of St Clements, in the Mile End area. It provides affordable housing, allowing long-term residents who would be priced out to stay in the area, countering the tendencies of displacement and housing unaffordability. Supported by the Greater London Authority to work with a private developer, the CLT also promotes community engagement and is actively working on the creation of a community centre at the St Clements site.

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Stará Tržnica: Breathing life into an old market hall

Stará Tržnica (Old Market Hall) is a historical building in the centre of Bratislava. After years of unsuccessful attempts by the municipality to keep the market alive, a redevelopment plan with the input of the locals was realised by the Alianca Stará Tržnica combining a food market, cultural events, cafés, a grocery shop, a cooking school and a soda water manufacture. The space has helped to rebuild the community and runs in an economically sustainable way.

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Cascina Roccafranca – The Public-Civic Governance of Space

Cascina Roccafranca is a multi-functional community centre operating in a building owned by the City of Turin. The centre is managed through a cooperation between public and civic actors: a scheme that offers a valuable governance model while providing a wide range of social and cultural activities.

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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.

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Largo Residências: Transforming a community through responsible tourism

Largo Residências is a hostel, hotel, artist-in-residence and café in Lisbon’s fast-changing Intendente neighbourhood. Largo Residências, run by a cooperative, uses its revenue from tourism and events to develop projects to support the cultural and social inclusion of the most vulnerable groups. In the past years, Largo has become a social net for many of the area’s residents and a community as well as a community hub, leading the discussion about Lisbon’s touristification and gentrification. Endangered by the tourism-driven real estate development transforming the city’s historical areas, Largo has been working on opening new spaces for its activities.

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Interactive Cities – A conversation with Daniela Patti

What is the local challenge when implementing digital governance tools?
Daniela Patti, Interactive Cities Network’s Lead Expert, answered to this and other questions to introduce us the work that has been done with the Interactive Cities Network.
Interactive Cities’ final Conference in Genoa 11-13 April. 2018

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La Cuciria – A circular economy-based sewing workshop

La Cuciria – Sartoria Creativa Emotiva​ creates awareness of ethical consumption through the activity of sewing in the periphery of Ravenna. It functions as a commercial space to exhibit and sell locally created clothes: a circular economy model where material scraps are reused to make new products that are sold to the public to finance the initiative.

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De Besturing – From tenancy to collective ownership

De Besturing was founded in 2006 in an industrial area of The Hague and over the years it has been transformed from a temporary studio complex into a sustainable collective of artists and designers. Initially rented out for free on a temporary basis from the municipality, the community nevertheless collected the rent from tenants, constituting a capital that made possible the building’s purchase in 2017.

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Coop57 – Financing projects in the social and solidarity economy

Coop57 is a cooperative with the objective of financing projects in the social and solidarity economy. It was created in Barcelona in 1995 from a compensation fund that former employees of the publishing house Bruguera received when the company went bankrupt. Coop57 acts as a financial intermediary: it collects savings from citizens and channels them into social economy initiatives that promote employment, solidarity and sustainability.

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Müszi – Public functions in private spaces

MÜSZI Art & Community Centre was a cultural space operating on the 3rd floor of a socialist-style department store in Budapest. Müszi stands as an unprecedented venture in Budapest, a venue that positions itself as an independent, self-sustaining “house of culture,” and offers affordable space and activities to a wide range of age groups, while combining its artistic and social mission with business principles in a sustainable manner.

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The Peissnitzhaus – Renovation with community shares

The Peissnitzhaus, a historical building in Halle/Saale. The house had been empty and neglected since the German reunification until 2003, when 17 people founded the “Peißnitzhaus e.V.”, a non-profit organisation. The members began to renovate the subsidiary buildings and to revitalise the beer garden by offering cultural and educational events.

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Wikitoki – Sharing non-monetary resources

Wikitoki is a laboratory of co-creation and collaborative practices in Bilbao. Wikitoki experiments with new models of production and organisation giving an important role to non-monetary kinds of capital, such as time, knowledge, networks or contacts.

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Largo Residências – Urban regeneration through local jobs

Largo Residências is a hostel, hotel, artist-in-residence and café in Lisbon’s fast-changing Intendente neighbourhood. It serves as a community hub for many of the area’s residents and initiatives, and develops projects to support the cultural and social inclusion of the neighbourhood’s precarious inhabitants. The establishment of Largo was assisted by the Lisbon Municipality’s BIP/ZIP program in 2011.

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Bottega Artistico Musicale – Public-civic cooperation for independent culture

Bottega Artistico Musicale is an experimental centre of independent cultural production in Sapri, Southern Italy. BAM’s space encourages open sharing of uses, resources and skills, in order to promote mutualistic, cooperative and supportive production. The building was offered by the municipality for free and was renovated by students, temporary employees, unemployed people, graduates, musicians, activists, artists.

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Stara Trznica – New purpose for a public building

Alianca Stará Tržnica is an NGO managing the Old Market Hall, a historic building in the centre of Bratislava, combining a food market with cultural, as well as two cafés, a grocery shop, a cooking school and a soda water manufacturer. Rethinking the opportunities of the Old Market Hall allows the organisation to run the building in an economically sustainable way, while gradually renovating it, creating a new event venue and meeting space in the heart of the city.

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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 and their lease fee is collected in a mutual fund run by Trias. In recent years, Trias has also been working with public administrations, securing functions for properties that municipalities are obliged to sell under austerity laws.

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Afrikaanderwijk – Pooling neighbourhood resources

Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative in South Rotterdam’s Feijenoord area works on bringing together existing workspaces, entrepreneurs, producers, social organisations and the market. The Cooperative began its work by mapping the unrecognised competences of residents in the Afrikaanderwijk neighbourhood. Based on these skills, the Cooperative created a number of organisations to help residents use their skills.

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Goteo – Crowdsourcing community resources

Goteo is a platform for civil crowdfunding founded by Platoniq, a Catalan association of culture producers and software developers. Goteo helps citizen initiatives and social, cultural, technological projects that produce open source results and community benefits, in crowdfunding and crowdsourcing resources. Goteo’s crowdfunding campaigns have mobilised more than 90,000 people, collecting over 4,5 million euros. Goteo also helps initiatives gather non-monetary contributions and establish partnerships that can advance their work.

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Casa Netural

Casa Netural in Matera works as incubator for innovative and experimental projects. It includes a co-working space, a playroom, a kitchen, meeting rooms, relaxing rooms and bedrooms. Casa Netural’s objective is to create new business models and networks between communities and citizens around issues of social development and regional planning.

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Interazioni Urbane – Reactivating the market

Interazioni Urbane​ is an association based in Rome. Addressing the deterioration and gradual abandonment of Rome’s Primavalle market, together with Banco e sto​, they have brought together market vendors, local residents and municipal officers to help turning the market into a community hub.

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Interactive Cities – Opportunities and threats of digital tools

Eddy Adams is the Thematic Pole Manager (TPM) for URBACT with responsibility for Social Innovation and Human Capital. In this video he explains his point of view about new challenges and opportunities by working with digital tools.
Interactive Cities’ final Conference in Genoa 11-13 April. 2018

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Jurányi Incubator House – A home for performance arts

The Jurányi Incubator House brings together dozens of theatre groups, associations and creative companies in a former school building owned by the Budapest Municipality. Jurányi did not only create an unprecedented venue and umbrella organisation for the independent theatre scene, it also brought a cultural and community centre in an area with no cultural activities before.

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L’Alveare – Co-working as social service

L’Alveare​ is a co-working space in Rome that integrates a kindergarten, in order to allow parents, especially women, to return to their freelancing work with small children. In 2013 their project was awarded by Italia Camp​ and Unicredit as well as the Coopstartup​ that allowed them to transform the organisation into a working cooperative. The co-working and kindergarten, operating in a municipality-owned space, also accommodates lectures, trainings and workshops.

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ZOHO – Development with a hundred investors

ZOHO is a former inner city business area in Rotterdam, that gradually witnessed a loss of attractiveness. Stipo, an Amsterdam/Rotterdam-based urban regeneration office stepped in and cooperating with the area’s owner and various creative and social companies redeveloped the area step-by-step, through rethinking its empty buildings and public spaces.

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Vivero de Iniciativas Ciudadanas – Mapping and co-producing citizen initiatives

Vivero de Iniciativas Ciudadanas is a platform to support citizen projects in Madrid. Initiated by the architecture office Estudio SIC, the platform maps and brings together citizen initiatives that shape the city’s various neighbourhoods. Based on this mapping process and the related research, VIC teamed up with the Madrid Municipality and 6 more partners and made a successful bid in the European Union’s Urban Innovative Actions competition with the Mares Madrid project.

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LaFabrika detodalavida – Revitalising a rural area

LaFabrika detodalavida is a multifunctional community centre set up in an abandoned industrial space in Extremadura in Spain, that offers a series of local services to its rural community, such as cultural events, music, construction spaces and most importantly gathering venues.

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LaFabrika detodalavida – Revitalising a rural area

LaFabrika detodalavida is a multifunctional community centre set up in an abandoned industrial space in Extremadura in Spain, that offers a series of local services to its rural community, such as cultural events, music, construction spaces and most importantly gathering venues.

Read More »

ExRotaprint – Community ownership against speculation

ExRotaprint was founded by tenants of the Rotaprint industrial complex in Wedding, a traditional working class district in Northwest Berlin. When the complex was put up for sale by the Berlin Municipality’s Real Estate Fund, members of the ExRotaprint began to look into the possibility of buying the area.

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