gE.CO Living Lab

Inspiration

In the covid-19 emergency period, many solidarity services such as the provision of food, legal assistance, and hospitality have been managed by civic organizations who have launched innovative partnerships with public authorities. Public-civic partnership is a solution for developing new forms of cooperation and need to be fostered since they ensure local resilience. For this reason, gE.CO Living Lab - a H2020 project - is a very topical initiative: it is showing the existence of a Europe of the commons, where solidarity and local activism has a pivotal role to rethink the city.

What it does

gE.CO Living Lab will help generative commons around Europe in three ways:

1) Build a digital platform for collaboration that will map citizens’ initiatives as well as those Public Institutions engaged in new forms of partnership with local communities. This way, generative commons and Public Administrations can finally be connected in a new network able to promote the exchange of good practices and legal solutions;

2) Share experiences by evaluating a group of pilot cases in order to understand which socio-economic, cultural and legal factors make self-organised experiences sustainable and Public Institutions helpful for their development;

3) Make a toolkit using the results of the evaluation for scaling up sustainable generative commons and innovative local policies: best practices, recommendations as well as legal solutions will be developed for supporting the emergence of new generative commons through shared, public and open access contents.

How I built it

The project is managed by en European consortium with very different expertises. We are building a digital map and we are carrying out research activities to understand how citizens and public institutions are working in Europe and the main problems they are facing.

Challenges I ran into

The project shows the necessity of inventing new models of local government, where the use of public spaces is easier. Citizens should manage a place for inventing new models of developments, providing solidarity services and fighting social exclusion. Nevertheless, in many European cities these processes seem to be complicated by a very traditional organization and strict legal requirements.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We have the possibility to create a digital network where information, knowledge and best practices can circulate.

What I learned

During this first phase of the project, I'm learning that solutions and problems in the field of urban commoning are generally shared across Europe, and for this reason an European contribution is necessary to support local activism.

What's next for

We need to introduce new tools for supporting these initiatives, and basically we should understand how assess their impact. We need an innovative legal European framework.