CIVIC eState

The City of Ghent is exchanging experiences on urban commons with cities such as Naples (Italy), Gdańsk (Poland), Barcelona (Spain), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Iași (Romania) and Presov (Slovakia) in this URBACT Transfer Network.

The network purpose is to transfer through adaptation the Good Practice of the City of Naples, Lost & Found. It aims at guaranteeing the collective enjoyment as well as collective management of urban essential facilities conceived as urban commons. This public-community governance approach will secure fair and open access, participatory decision-making, sustainability and preservation for the benefit of future generations.

The CIVIC eState network is all about the policy challenge of recognising and/or co-designing legal and sustainable urban commons governance mechanisms enabling city inhabitants and local communities constitutional rights to collectively act in the general interest.

The approach could generate a prototype methodology for cities to generate a new breed of cooperative agreements or projects between city governments and civic, social, local businesses aimed at developing cities through an integrated approach. In particular the civic uses resolution could be considered a blueprint for a larger category of legal tools in compliance with EU law, especially the relevant EU legislation on public procurement and state aid, stifling cooperation among urban actors in order to build and deliver social infrastructure and services such as education, healthcare and housing.

It might also be able to generate through the hybridisation of these places and economic models new community-based job opportunities and forms of civic entrepreneurships. These cooperative agreements, partnerships or projects could be the basis for more sophisticated and solid forms of financing that could fund social projects through new funding mechanisms including social impact bonds, social project finance schemes and many other new public-private partnerships that involve the participation of long-term investors to generate a sustainability model through social bonds and impact investing mechanisms.

The CIVIC eState network is funded by the URBACT programme of the European Union.