This week’s speaker continues the theme which Jim Lunday started a couple of weeks ago. I have had so many people say how much they got out of that talk.
This week, instead of a Glaswegian and a Pom, we have a Kiwi who is working in Europe on some fascinating projects. His name is Tim Taylor and here is how he describes what he is doing and this is what he will tell us about:
European cities have an unprecedented opportunity to lead the world through a just and green transformation. EIT Climate-KIC has created a process to accelerate this urgently-needed urban transformation through mission-led innovation.
We have started this journey with 15 cities across Europe: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Kraków, Križevci, Leuven, Madrid, Malmö, Maribor, Milano, Niš, Orléans, Sarajevo, Skopje and Vienna.
Initial work with each city community entails critical capacity-building with city officials and community members to create a new mode of collaboration in each place. This generally means establishing a cross-community action incubation and implementation team, that integrates with existing organisational models in the community while transcending their inevitable limitations.
In each place we are prioritising work on key enablers of transformational change – the ‘how’ before the ‘what’. This means working hard in each community on:
· Investing in inclusive co-creation processes that involve the full spread of the community in visioning, action planning and developing long-term models for transparency, democracy and collective management
· Preparing the investment case for the breadth of action needed, and establishing suitable financing mechanisms to blend public and private capital investment at the speed and scale that would actually be required (€billions)
· Harnessing the power of data and digital innovation using data-commons models for community ownership and interoperability standards to accelerate technical innovation.
· Reorganising governance, planning, procurement and policy models to sufficiently serve the speed of action and inclusivity that will be needed
Then we integrate this enabling work into a robustly planned portfolio of actions and experiments that are designed back from what communities will have to undertake if they are to achieve their mission. Priority areas emerging include: deep community renovation, housing, energy transition, mobility, green and circular economy, food and nature-based infrastructure.
In the south south-eastern cities, issues such as air pollution, poor infrastructure, inefficient public service delivery, emigration and diminishing trust are linking together in reinforcing negative patterns that make it even harder to solve for the causes and impacts of the climate emergency. Yet we see an enormous ‘leap-frog’ opportunity where communities in south east have an urgent demand for better, and therefore could demonstrate in short time what a radical 21st century leap in prosperity, equity, inclusiveness and climate resilience could really be. So, we are working with the group of south-eastern city communities on joint mission to: transform 20 communities across South East Europe into some of the best possible places in Europe to live, work and visit by 2025 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
This session will be a great opportunity for both community activists, Council staff and elected reps to learn from one of us operating in places much more challenging than our small place in the planet.Tim is especially interested in covering housing during the hour session.
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