Co-city Journal 6: final steps of the Turin project

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 invested on the urban commons as a lever for addressing key urban governance issues such as poverty and target the most vulnerable communities in the city. 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 leader 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 instrument of social inclusion and against poverty in many deprived areas of the City. The project is coordinated by the City Department for Decentralization, Youth and Equal Opportunities. The Neighborhood Houses is another key partner in the implementation of the Co-City project. They are a neighborhood-based network introduced by the city of Turin in 2006 to promote the diffusion of community spaces all over the city and 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 establishing a cooperation to take care or regenerate the same urban commons. The project is now in the final phase. This is the sixth and last Co-City journal, it will summarize the main results and lessons learnt by the partners through the project and the possible evolutions and future steps of the project after the end of the UIA funding period, as well as the transfer capacity of the Co-City model and tools in other cities.

The first Co-City journal, published in January 2018 retraced the overall architecture of the project and provided an overview over the challenges its implementation poses to the City of Turin. 

The second UIA Co-City journal, published in June 2018 looked deeply 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 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 analyzed empirically and in depth the proposals of pacts of collaboration.

The fourth Journal, published in September 2019 shed light on how the Co-City Turin project is making impactful progresses at the local, national and EU level. At the local level, the first pacts of collaboration were officially approved.

The fifth journal, published in June 2020 provided a first introduction the “New Regulation for Governing the Urban Commons”, issued by the City of Turin at the end of the Co-City implementation phase, based on the lessons learnt through the project. The fifth journal also provided updates on the main news about the project: first, a general 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 (the Zoom-in 3 is dedicated exclusively to the new Regulation’s analysis, providing a Reader of the New Turin Regulation for Governing the Urban Commons). 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 sixth and final journal of the Co-City project will introduce the readers to the final steps of the Co-City Turin project, drawing also from the Co-City Final Evaluation Report, that analyzed the project’s results from the perspective of the Theory of Change approach.

In the final phase, Co-City invested efforts 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 worked to ensure that the knowledge and policy capacity on governance of urban commons produced is transferred to another UIA project that kick-started in February 2020, “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.