Cross-sectoral approach: linking to city strategies

Focus on combining policies to make demand and offer meet sustainably

Utrecht Plan Einstein is a project which applied a set of accompanying measures alongside a government run refugee reception centre. By stressing activation from day one. The project provides training in English, entrepreneurship and business incubation  for refugees who are in class alongside local people. Where possible young people are also housed adjacent to refugees (in Overvecht this was in a separate unit, in Haydn it was not possible). A wide range of indoor and outdoor social activities are animated with the young tenants and with people from the local community. 

There were two policies that the project succeeded in bringing together, namely employment and refugee inclusion. The first was to attempt to reconcile the national reception centre policy run by COA with the local need to integrate migrants as fast as possible. Utrecht, therefore, provides an example of making labour market integration a priority, although in practice refugees were still moved out of the Overvecht and Haydn reception centres at short notice. What emerges is the relevance of integration amongst policies but also in relation to multi-level governance, as both employment and migration policy are of national competence with important local impacts.

Normally, a refugee cannot work in the first six months after arriving in the Netherlands. Plan Einstein managed to find ways of bringing residents of the reception centre closer to the labour market from their first day after arriving, such as through the courses mentioned above. Once inducted there were internships available in local businesses for those with adequate language and other skills.  

A key aspect of the skills training was the idea that they should be future proof.  This is easier in theory than in practice but the evaluation suggests that refugees valued the skills and opportunities that they had engaged with.  

“Now in the national policy, everyone is convinced also on the national level that you will have to activate people locally in one way or another. And that is all due to the Plan Einstein concept we made.“  stated Plan Einstein Project coordinator.

Positioning cultural change of the city at the heart of the project 

Cluj Future of Work objective was to pilot a transdisciplinary Cultural and Creative Industries - Knowledge Intensive Business Services mix at city level. Ideas from cultural industries were incubated with business and tech know-how, with the aim of creating higher added value jobs and to explore prototypes for local added value chains that enable the transition to work 4.0. By Also mixing together competencies from sectors threatened by technological unemployment with those from the transdisciplinary pilot, while at the same time enabling underprivileged communities excluded from the labour market to use their collective knowledge, the project reshapes the ways we imagine work.  

Cluj Future of Work illustrates an integrated approach across sectors in two distinct ways. At the policy level it links to City strategies including for Article 7 and specifically to the investment through ERDF in the CREIC facility. The development and kitting out of the three labs has made a significant contribution to the facilities available at CREIC. Within the project there is a clear effort to work across industrial sectors that are at risk through being susceptible to automation with new design thinking from creative and cultural industries with the intention of making the value chain more resilient in the future. It is still too early to say whether these efforts will be successful at the level of the Cluj economy, but this integrated approach shows a high degree of sophistication in attempting it.  

Achieving this level of cross-sectoral integration has required a high level of partnership working in a form of cross-sectoral governance. This started through an alliance at the co-creation stage between Cluj Cultural Centre (CCC) and the city and expanded to include a wide range of organisations in a quadruple helix structure. The role of the Innovation Unit at CCC is also notable as it has enabled the city to design new approaches that have made the project a success.

“It's obvious there that CCC has a central role because of its very structure, because it is an umbrella organisation membership based, where also the cultural institutions and the local and regional administration are members, but also these clusters. So there was already a connection before. And our role as an organisation was to somehow catalyse these types of connections. I think the difference is that this was the first opportunity to engage in all kinds of engines full-on together in a project because before when we've been working together.” Project coordinator at CCC  

Although there was progress in cross-sectoral integration, the project struggled to integrate the actions in Pata Rât with the rest of the project. This was perhaps inevitable given the extreme deprivation at the three of the four camps where even basic sanitation is lacking and housing conditions are lamentable. Nevertheless, the project succeeded in bringing tangible benefits with the opening of the sanitation units, the free WIFI, and the bus service. Not all of these advances are secure for the future. The free bus passes ended in November 2021 and challenges are maintaining the sanitary facilities in the face of sporadic vandalism. 

Focus on building on earlier initiatives and practices to meet future visions 

The Home Silk Road in Lyon Metropole project provides housing solutions for vulnerable groups in a dynamically changing neighbourhood of Villeurbanne, in the metropolitan area of Lyon. The project prepares the low-waste, long-term architectural transformation of a heritage building in a former silk industry complex, to accommodate various housing forms ranging from social housing to student accommodation, public services, cultural venues, social and solidarity initiatives, and a restaurant as well as co-working spaces and incubators.

During the construction phase, the project also makes use of transitory uses of social and cultural activities to bring new communities to the site, test future uses for the building and its surroundings, as well as to engage residents in a participatory process to co-design future activities and narratives for the neighbourhood. Home Silk Road created synergies between sectors that are often disconnected: by bringing temporary housing to a construction site and by inserting cultural and social activities in a housing project, it breaks down the tradition of urban regeneration and introduces new dynamics and new synergies in Villeurbanne’s Carré de Soie neighbourhood.

L’Autre Soie, this experiment that took place in the former silk factory of Villeurbanne, was at the heart of the UIA-funded project Home Silk Road. L’Autre Soie was born from the marriage of two projects: while the GIE La Ville Autrement was looking for a site to build a new emergency shelter, the cultural and social innovation laboratory CCO, with a history of half a century in Villeurbanne, was seeking a new location and a bigger concert hall. This unlikely association between a housing provider and a cultural centre was brought into being by the Municipality of Villeurbanne which was looking into the regeneration of the Carré de Soie area, with support from the Lyon Metropole.

Culture and the activities brought to L’Autre Soie by the social economy initiatives hosted in the frame of the “transitory occupation” of the heritage site are by no means ornaments in an otherwise mainstream development project. “Structures like the CCO or the social inclusion association Alynea are not used here as cultural or social washing at the end of the project,” underlines CCO director. On the contrary, they act as links to connect a diversity of people and organisations. “Culture, for us, constitutes the fourth pillar of sustainability, with the economy, ecology and social services,” he concludes.

More precisely, culture here is used to build heterogeneity in the midst of a housing project, turning the coexistence of residents and people from the neighbourhood into lively connections. On the other hand, CCO’s cultural activities and the organisation’s involvement in citizen participation and various forms of emancipatory actions serve to build a collective imaginary, a shared narrative about the neighbourhood.

Building cross-sectoral partnerships 

The partnership in Ravenna’s DARE project combined strategic management and design experiences with technological and research know-how as well as participatory processes, community finance and communication. The management role of the Ravenna Municipality is complemented by strong competencies in strategic design, technology, crowd-funding, participation and community engagement. 

DARE’s participatory logic prompts the municipality to act as a process enabler, helping its partners and communities to use their best competencies in co-designing the future of the Darsena. Such shared leadership requires the creation of a governance structure, the Process OrganizerS Team (POST) that monitors processes and connects strategy, opportunities and needs in the form of policymaking bodies, economic initiatives and citizens.

The DARE consortium developed a working model for the project that included a variety of working groups as well as a well-defined governance model to assure the participation of all partners and actors in all decision-making and operational steps of the projects. DARE involved several policy areas within the Ravenna Municipality, in particular, Human Resources and Quality Services, European Policies and Territorial Information Systems. The departments of European Policies, Urban Regeneration and Smart City were directly represented in the project. DARE is an experiment to bring together these departments with a new methodological approach that connected urban regeneration with a horizontal approach to participation. The various working groups ensured the engagement of all departments in different phases and tasks of the project. 

With participation and communication at the core of the DARE project, many of the project’s working processes were not pre-defined: instead, they were co-designed with consortium partners and a broader group of stakeholders. With certain governance, communication and data management structures in place, innovation within the project was ongoing: DARE’s in-built incremental logic and agile methodology assured that certain decisions are revisited, and directions were adjusted according to recurrent feedback cycles.