How Cities Can Learn from Engaged Cities Award Winners
We started the Engaged Cities Award so we could identify and share the most promising ways that cities are engaging residents to solve public problems. In the inaugural award process, we found cities working constructively with citizens to meet pressing challenges from three continents and across the political spectrum.
We identified 10 finalists who worked with residents to make safer public spaces, healthier communities, and better drivers. These city leaders — in partnership with residents — have transformed the social and physical landscape of their cities, reduced violence, and rewritten policy. And they accomplished these things with small budgets or no budget at all. Any city can replicate these strategies to do the same.
In order to help cities around the world learn from, adapt, and improve upon the approaches of Engaged Cities finalists, we’ve taken a deep dive into the context and strategies of each of the 10 cities in a series of case studies. We also produced blueprints for strategies that we found to be most easily replicable by a large variety of cities around the world.
One of the cities we have spent the most time working with and learning from was Engaged Cities Award winner, Bologna, Italy. We first built a case study on their citizen engagement solutions and then created a blueprint about one of their most replicable strategies, called Incredibol!
Historically, Bologna was a city with strong civic engagement, but citizen participation had decreased and onerous bureaucratic requirements had made it difficult for people to effect change in their communities. After the European economic crisis hit in 2008, trust in politics and government leaders disintegrated. Many people withdrew from civic life and relied on their peers for information rather than putting their trust in institutions. In the 2014 regional elections, only 38 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, compared to 68 percent during the previous election.
Underlying a lack of engagement was the fact that Bologna regulations made it difficult, if not impossible, for citizens to make changes in their communities. Bureaucracy meant that making small improvements to public spaces involved red tape and working with several city departments, a process that discouraged citizen engagement and led to increased apathy among residents. When Virginio Merola was elected mayor of Bologna, his office made a concerted effort to change that. In just a few years, city officials have seen a marked increase in citizen engagement — about 480 collaboration pacts have been implemented to date, leading to a range of community improvements, and more than 14,000 people voted in the first year of participatory budgeting.
In 2014, the city council passed the “regulation on public collaboration between citizens and the city for the care and regeneration of urban commons,” which allowed citizens and private organizations to sign collaboration pacts with the city in order to improve public space, green areas, and abandoned buildings. Pacts start from project proposals submitted by citizens — whether an individual, a group of people, a community, or a nonprofit. They can be a one-off, like painting a bench or planting flowers, or a larger, ongoing project like rehabbing an abandoned building.
In 2015, the city reorganized the districts in Bologna, creating six distinct territories that served extensions of the city government. The districts, which each have their own councils and presidents, act as local hubs that are attuned to neighborhoods’ individual needs. The newly formed districts better allocate the city’s resources and have spurred a renewed sense of community and shared purpose. As an outgrowth of this reform, the city also created six laboratories, one in each district, to foster connections between local government and the people of Bologna. The labs serve as centers of collaboration where staff members help citizens refine and develop their ideas. One staff member is assigned to each district, which helps them build relationships and maintain an ongoing connection with residents.
The mayor also established a Civic Imagination Office, which oversees the labs and works to boost citizen participation, and opened up a participatory budgeting process. This allows all residents, regardless of how long they have lived in the city and regardless their place of official residence, to propose and vote on the citizen-led projects they most want to see come to life. The city also integrated its Incredibol! program — a yearly competition that supports local startups — into its overall effort to boost engagement and make it easy for citizens to design and improve their communities.
Incredibol! has helped Bologna transform vacant city-owned buildings into vibrant community spaces, offices, and storefronts, lowering maintenance and security costs and reducing blight. The program provides support to small businesses who may renovate spaces to suit their needs without the significant overhead cost of rent. Incredibol! can also help the city attract entrepreneurs, artists, and businesses to specific neighborhoods while helping new cultural institutions and startups grow. City leaders can tailor the public contest to support particular communities and support the kind of businesses and organizations the city most needs.
While different cities have different histories, the struggles that Bologna faced around regulations and bureaucracy are not unique. Many cities also struggle with what to do with empty spaces and how to integrate new community members into the fabric of local life. We hope that our blueprint and case study help other cities replicate best practices at home.
As a result of the additional recognition Bologna is receiving for their innovative civic engagement work after becoming the Engaged Cities winner, Cities of Service is co-hosting a convening with the city’s Fondazione Innovazione Urbana (Urban Innovation Foundation), NESTA, and URBACT, during which city leaders, practitioners, and researchers will learn about and examine citizen engagement approaches and projects in other cities and explore opportunities to adopt new approaches in their cities.
We can’t wait to share our next round of Engaged Cities Award finalists later this month!
