The three pilot sites in Turin, Athens and Paris will test the platform’s expected outcomes (e.g. when it comes to the utility, usability, inclusiveness and reliability of individual features). Pilot site selection CO3 trials sites have been selected to reflect different contexts: each site starts its journey towards a more participatory economic model from a different departure point. This enables validating CO3 solutions with Public Administrations and stakeholders that have hitherto operated under different technological, administrative and political circumstances (e.g. ICT solutions already put in place). This will enable evidence-based learning about conditions for successful upscaling of the assessed technology ecosystem, which will again ultimately help in gaining a better – and context sensitive – understanding.
In the pilots, we will ensure the promotion of equality, diversity and inclusion towards the development of a socially just and sustainable ecosystem of service co-creation and co-production.
TURIN (IT)
Turin is a North Western Italian city, with a population of about 900,000 inhabitants, and 1.7 million people in the metropolitan area. For decades Turin had been an industrial city whose main production was cars around the internationally known factory FIAT. Since the nineties Turin has started a deep transformation from the industrial city toward a creative and smart city. The risk of protests against urban policies is becoming more urgent, and setting up procedures for new form of inclusive and participative welfare could be a valuable way to reduce that risk. The concept of urban regeneration adopted by the city of Torino thus implies not only urban planning and social, economic, environmental, cultural issues but also a greater participation by stakeholders in the decision-making policies, and active involvement of citizens and system that has always been a distinctive character of the area.
Turin is pursuing several initiatives and projects fostering a sustainable, intelligent and inclusive urban growth. To achieve this objective an integrated approach is crucial as well as a deep understanding of citizens needs and requests in order to address the urban development through a constant dialogue between citizens and institutions. Examples of the city’s initiatives are the SMILE master plan for the Smart City, Torino Social Innovation, a public program with the overall objective of investing in young social innovators.
Co-city project on urban commons, will constitute the background on top of which CO3 will be developed. It aims at the development of at least 25 commons in the peripheral areas of Turin. For 1 of them the project will identify a number of unused buildings with no market value and will restructure them. For 10 other commons the Municipality will put at disposal of commoners underused public services such as schools in the afternoon. Finally, citizens can propose other places to be used to create commons. Differently from traditional public tenders the public spaces will not be assigned to commoners on the basis of a competitive selection.
CO3 will provide its app to the commons developed in the Co-city project, to scale up their activities. The engagement activities will be carried out by the Network of Neighbourhood Houses (third party of CTO). The 9 Neighbourhood Houses in Torino are the instruments of the Municipality for promoting new welfare policies, experiment new form of direct democracy, improving social cohesion, and meeting citizens’ availability to participate.
In CO3 the Neighbourhood Houses will continue the work of Co-city on the commons and will experiment the CO3 Prototype also on themselves coherently with their mission of experimenting new models of community welfare based on reciprocity and active participation of citizens in a horizon of social and solidal economy. The 8 Neighbourhood Houses engage around 400,000 participants each year, organize 420 events and collaborate with 150 associations and groups, thus ensuring a large participation to CO3.
Open Incet (Open Innovation Centre Torino) mission is to accelerate the local innovation ecosystem of the City, by engaging the stakeholders (public, business, academia and third sector/citizens) in the generation of innovative solutions. Open Incet is a public-private partnership: the local PA and eight private organizations manages the spaces, a former power cables factory revitalized.
The Open Incet pilot in particular will be based on its Crowdfunding services initiative addressing SMEs and citizens’ projects: an augmented showroom will be provide evidence about the potential of Augmented Reality in creating awareness and enhance creative entrepreneurship in the field of Blockchain powered local economies.
Informagiovani is the public service of the City of Turin providing information and to youth as regards study and training opportunities, job placements, cultura events in the City, health, volunteering, international youth exchanges.
The University of Turin, as aforementioned in the “Colonization game” box, will provide other experimental sites starting from the Campus Luigi Einaudi.
ATHENS, (EL)
The economic crisis precipitated a drastic change in the stratification of Greek society, intensifying social inequality, exacerbating the threat of poverty and creating a new underclass of outcasts in large urban centers. The cumulative shrinkage of GDP by 25% from 2008 to the end of 2013 led to a dramatic spike in unemployment. The protests of 2008 in response to the imminent global financial crisis and to the privatisation of public spaces in Greece gave rise to the Greek solidarity movement (SM) in its current form. During that period a civic drive towards self-organisation, self-management and self-empowerment emerged with the (informal) establishment of several self-managed spaces, social centres and local citizen initiatives.
At this time, various sources suggest the existence of around 400 SMs: 40 solidarity clinics in Greece, with an average of 46 volunteers per clinic, and receiving regularly around 2000 visits per clinic per month; 47 food solidarity structures and 21 solidarity kitchens with around 56 volunteers per group, which for example, in 2014 distributed 4318 parcels of food fortnightly; 45 without middlemen goods distribution groups with more than 5000 tons of distributed products for the years 2012-2014. The operation of these informal urban movements in addition to the emergence of a new cooperative movement and the passing of new legislation for social enterprises in Greece, have created fertile grounds for experimenting with new forms of urban and digital commoning practices and the establishment of social and solidarity economy initiatives.
The use case scenario for the City of Athens focuses on “ad hoc / on demand” delivery of daily hot meals to people in need. The scenario aims to motivate the complete ecosystem of the city, namely households, public administration bodies, local groups of citizens and other solidarity initiative organizations, to respond to the challenge of delivering their daily food surplus, to residents of the city affected by the socio-economic and/or migration crisis. The pilot scenario shall be based on a “supply – demand” model, where the food availability (quantity) will correlate to the overall food delivery experience (quality). The state-of-the-art in Athens includes initiatives such as food-sharing by individual citizens and organized meals offering by diverse organizations to specific social groups (homeless groups, indigent groups, etc.). We will experiment the viability of CO3 technological implementation and evaluate its social acceptance and impact.
The process of the Athens pilot is launched at the moment that an active citizens/group of citizens share their excess food and place it in a specific location within the city. The AR interface of CO3 will allow end-users to insert the location trace in the interactive map, as well as to monitor similar food-sharing activities that take place in other locations around the city. For future activities, active citizens will be informed by the notification feature. In parallel, the citizens/group of citizens that are under nutrition needs can be notified in real time through the interactive map for ad-hoc food supply. In case of residents that don’t acquire sufficient technology/devices a mediator by NGOs or municipal organizations will be in charge to inform the aforementioned group of citizens. An interactive map of food-supply points will be the outcome ensuring anonymity of the user that provides the meal as well as the user that consumes it. In case of end-users that don’t acquire a smartphone to monitor the interactive map, a municipal service will be implemented as a food-supply info-point with screens that display the information.
PARIS. Etablissement Public Territorial Plaine Commune (FR)
The Etablissement Public Territorial (EPT) Plaine Commune is a French intercommunal public structure, with 9 cities, created in January 2016 as part of the Greater Paris and located in the district of Seine-Saint-Denis in the Île-de-France region. EPT Plaine Commune provides services to 408,000 citizens from more than 140 nationalities: urban planning, environment, housing, transport, economic development, employment, research and education, tourism, sports facilities, libraries.
The CO3 Pilot will be inserted in IRI – Centre Pompidou’s research programme “Contributive Learning Territory” created by ETP Plaine Commune, IRI (Centre Pompidou, Paris) and MSH Paris Nord. The project aims to involve researchers from different disciplines: lawyers, economists, mathematicians, biologists, engineers, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, computer scientists, etc. They have the mission to deploy contributing workshops on the territory, by mobilizing different actors around common issues in order to develop and experiment new models of development centered on the notion of contributive economy: the model proposes to cope with the gradual automation of jobs by redistributing to the citizens the time saved, so that this time is put at the service of the development of their capacities and the sharing of their knowledge, in the framework of urban commons, collective projects, ecologically, socially and economically sustainable for the territories. A structure can be labeled as negentropic if it contributes to the implementation of a sustainable profit (social, environmental, economic) for the territory and if the jobs it proposes are an enabling activity mobilizing the practice of knowledge.
The goal of the project is, first, the formation of a local collective intelligence, by articulating the research activities with the administrative, economic and citizen life of the territory, using new types of social networks and new digital features promoting the participation of inhabitants in the research and circulation of knowledge, and facilitating the discussion and public debate of a large number of individuals and groups. Second, the development of processes of empowerment in the area, likely to give citizens the means to develop individual and collective knowledge.
The experimentations planned for the project pertain to the following fields:
Capacitation/Education: this experimentation brings together academics, parents’ associations, national education officials, education professionals and digital platform designers.
Digital urbanity: in partnership with Orange, Dassault Systems and the Public French Bank Caisse des Dépôts, this experiment will involve architects and urban planners, engineers, anthropologists and sociologists, associations of co-construction and contributing housing, building and construction companies such as VINCI.
Local and informal jobs: this experimentation brings together sociologists, economists, companies, associations, third-places, workshops and “fab-lab” of the territory and inhabitants.
Finance and accounting: in partnership with Bank Société Générale, this experiment aims to reflect on new modes of financing, investment and credit allowing the implementation of a contributive economy, which presupposesnew criteria and measurement indicators and new models for calculating value, making it possible to take into account the negentropic/contributive potentials of companies for the territory, by measuring in particular the production of societal value and the sustainability of the economic activities implemented.
