Open Call: Funding the cooperative city

Funding the cooperative city is a research program aiming at identifying new economic models for community-driven spatial transformation around Europe.

Funded by the Advocate Europe program, we will organize three workshops in Budapest, Rome and Madrid where local initiatives can meet inspiring international projects selected through an international call. The results of this experience, together with the information gathered in the previous workshops held in Rotterdam, Berlin and Paris will compile the “Funding the Cooperative City” publication. The goal of the publication is to develop, through the narrative of selected case studies and the analysis of local socio-economic contexts, a series of recommendations and guidelines useful both for citizens’ initiatives and supportive administrations, at local as well as at the European Union level.

Please send your contributions to info@eutropian.org by 30th October 2015. For further information please visit eutropian.org, contact info@eutropian.org or download the call in a pdf format here.

ABOUT FUNDING THE COOPERATIVE CITY

The Funding the Cooperative City project focuses on an important phenomenon of today’s European societies. Austerity measures, together with the gradual withdrawal of state and municipal administrations from providing welfare services and maintaining public institutions as well as the financiarization of real estate stocks have prompted citizen initiatives and professional groups to organize their own services and spaces.

The emerging self-organization of new spaces of work, culture and social welfare was enabled by specific socio-economic circumstances: unemployment, solidarity networks, changing property prices and the innovative aggregation of resources created opportunities for stepping out of the regular dynamisms of real estate development. In some cases, cooperative ownership structures exclude the possibility of speculation, in others, new welfare services are integrated in the local economic and built tissues, relying on available resources and capacities. These new development processes also witnessed the emergence of a new generation of investors, operating along principles of ethics and sustainability.

The Funding the Cooperative City project collects cases and models of community-led real estate development projects from all over Europe. By analyzing new ownership, management and economic models, highlighting new tendencies and identifying emerging actors in contemporary urban development, the project makes the case for cooperative development as an increasingly important component of European cities.

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE

Please send your contribution in the form of texts, images and diagrams about one or more chosen cases or theoretical schemes of new economic models supporting community-led urban development. Case studies may include, but are not limited to green areas, buildings, social services, community spaces, etc.

■ Texts should be received in .doc file and contain up to 6.000 characters including spaces
■ Images should be arranged in A3 vertical format in pdf with 300dpi resolution.

AWARDS

Selected contributions will be published in the ‘Funding the Cooperative City’ publication and exhibition, as well as invited to one of the workshops in Madrid, Budapest or Rome in spring 2016.

FURTHER INFORMATION

For any further information please contact info@eutropian.org or download the pdf here.

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