Experience evaluations are the first main products of the Eurbanities project. The experiences cover cases where neighborhood-level development reveals a social conflict between local stakeholders and the civil society/local inhabitants have an active role among them. An experience is defined as a long term process that can last several years, and probably hasn’t even reached its final point yet. The process is in the same time non-linear: it is affected by several external and internal factors, events and other changes.
The main objective of the experience evaluations is to describe this process by presenting the changing positions and objectives of each stakeholder (with particular attention on civil society) and the strategies they follow in order to achieve their goals. The evaluation analyses are based on a common grid developed within EUrbanities. According to the grid, one experience is composed by several phases that are linked by turning points. At each turning point, the position and point of view of all main stakeholders (civil society, private and public sectors) are redefined. The results of the experience evaluations form a basis for the creation of several scenarios of participation processes.
Altogether 20 experiences from 9 European countries representing Northern, Western, Southern, and Central and Eastern Europe have been analyzed [1]. The experiences represent a variety of urban situations ranging from the very small city (for example Rónakeresztes in Hungary) through mid-sized regional centres (Brighton, Sassari, Krakow) to large European capitals and urban regions (Budapest, Berlin, or Bucharest).
The evaluations were elaborated between December 2015 and September 2016 and were presented and discussed at two transnational project meetings in poster format in March and July 2016. In the first part of 2017, EUrbanities will publish a booklet describing the experiences including an introduction describing a typology of neighborhood-level participation.
[1] Belgium (1), Finland (2), France(1), Germany(1), Hungary (6), Italy (2), Poland (3), Romania (1), Ukraine (3) and the United Kingdom (1)
EUrbanities 