A Place To Be-Come: journal 3

Leadership in this project can be seen as distributed through three main levels: the first is Arebs, which is the municipal agency in charge of APTBC implementation; the second is represented by the chiefs of municipal departments, such as Works department, Prevention, Communication and Urban Development; and third, the top-level political leadership, the city Council. Among these three levels leadership is not equally distributed, but each level might contribute to bring innovation to the project. In the APTBC project, we have witnessed to a progressive transfer of knowledge, expertise and awareness from the first to the second and third level. If the third level, the political one, had agreed at the beginning of the project on the main goals and paths of change, it has nonetheless manifested little participation and interest in practice: they rarely took part to events and steering committees, they hardly made themselves available for bilateral meetings. With the advancement of the project, this has slightly changed as results became more and more tangible. A similar but even more effective process has occurred with the second level, which was more accessible for the team project and on which many operational results depended: it started with scepticism but it ended with collaboration, confidence and willingness to change. Along this process, it was necessary to work not only to achieve the project’s objectives but also to convince the other levels of leadership to embark on the same endeavour and make the change possible throughout the administrative machine.

Lessons learnt and emerging issues

Many efforts have been put into making project’s results visible, tangible and remarkable in this past year; if APTBC has gained the political support needed for these efforts to be transformed into a consolidated strategy for social cohesion and integrated into a coherent policy for the city central neighbourhoods will be seen in the months to come. As a lesson learnt from this experience, it emerges clearly the necessity to include this challenge while writing a project proposal. Leadership can be reluctant to take the risk of changing and innovating, especially in a context of economic crisis (not to mention an health crisis). At the same time, implementing a pilot project is a challenging enterprise and it would be easier if all the levels of leadership were aligned before the project starts. A new model of governance should be studied to make these levels work together since the design of the project proposal. The model should define a clear space of negotiation, mechanisms of collaboration between the management team and every municipal department; and a scheme of human resources which promotes a web of relationships across departments and the municipal agencies.

Delays with the implementation of the three investments have augmented in the last year. Every time that a delay was expected - despite the possibility of publishing the tendering file while waiting for regional validation - the delay materialised. As we have seen in the introduction to this journal, to the initial delays caused by extra-time requested in reason of the regional guardianship, the extraordinary increase in the costs of materials for construction added further delay. To this circumstance the team reacted with budget adjustments and a search for new funding. At this stage of the project, most contracts has been issued and need a close follow-up to finalise all the construction sites and achieve all the activities of project. The procurement for the second creative station, la Cour des Marêts, is still pending, waiting for the regional validation of a change in the budget line. Besides delays with big investments’ cumbersome procedures, some bottlenecks were encountered also with more ordinary administrative processes.

In this context, a few innovations could have been introduced since the beginning and will be discussed below, but at this stage this remains a high-risk challenge for two major investments, the day-shelter and the second creative station, which most likely will not be completed by the end of the project.

Lessons learnt and emerging issues

Some organisational arrangements adopted at the beginning of the project could have helped to save time and facilitate partners’ work. Let’s see three of them. First, given the gap in competence and awareness about administrative and procurement procedures between project partners, a training provided in the first year to every actor involved in this activity would help to build a shared knowledge and transfer innovative practices into the daily management of financial resources. Second, the city’s financial department could draft guidelines in order to propose direction to partners and establish a smooth collaboration between the project management and municipal departments. This collaboration could also include an officer at financial department in charge of following the project’s contracts. And third, a formal agreement between the city of Seraing and the Walloon Region, which fixes derogation to the validation rule in case of European funding, could help to save at least two months between the selection of the project designer and the publication of the invitation to tender.

This year has been fruitful in many ways as far as stakeholders’ collaboration and integration of activities is concerned. In the first years of the project, much of energy was directed towards the identification of mechanisms and tools facilitating internal communication and multiplication of meetings to organise the decision-making process. The COVID-19 crisis consolidated some forms of collaboration, mostly from a distance. Some partners considered this practice a little bit too formal and time-consuming, but the given circumstances limited the adoption of different approaches. Those tools and practices had the advantage to keep the partners engaged during hard times and build some relationships across city departments. Change happened in this last year, during which many positive results have become apparent and concrete. A real advancement is seen in the way that three departments, Public Works, Prevention and Communication, have changed their attitude towards the project implementation, they have improved their cross-departmental cooperation and their engagement has grown. More progress concerns the collaboration with the CPAS, the office for social services, and new collaborations and relations that have been prompted and underpinned by cooperating on some initiatives such as the day-shelter, the Medibus and La Ruche à projets. Each of these actions has requested a great amount of networking and teamwork to create new relationships, involve new partners, share goals and consolidate a common practice. This effort has been pursued by following multiple threads and channels of communication by different APTBC partners, sometimes together and sometimes independently but sharing a common strategy. Two considerations can be made in relation to this achievement: on the one hand, this is clearly a challenge that has been addressed with determination and patience; on the other hand, local officials have mostly proved receptive to change and innovation when encouraged to embrace the positive impacts of new practices.

Lessons learnt and emerging issues

The inherent nature of the APTBC project is one with a strongly multidimensional and integrated approach to urban poverty. This characteristic needs a particular attention not to miss the big picture, while concentrating on singular actions. In this sense, working on the improvement and empowerment of cross-departmental cooperation is crucial both to smooth the process of implementation throughout the project and in view of its upscaling.

Some barriers must be taken into account though: a recognised and validated system to assure the sustainability of the project in the medium-long term is still to put in place, especially with regard to a sustainable green areas management and participatory processes at the community hubs. This might make some practices more fragile and prone to disruption. In one year and a half the next municipal elections will bring changes at the political level and a solid integration of recently acquired good practices from APTBC would be essential to help with the transition.

The great challenge of the APTBC project has been since the beginning the creation of the conditions necessary for an organised and cohesive community of citizens to emerge. This would happen through the provision of spaces suitable for a community to grow and thrive (inclusive and attractive public spaces - including green areas, a new day-shelter and two community hubs) and the support to citizens’ projects. As mentioned elsewhere, Seraing is a context where participation is not common habit and, despite a large number of grassroots associations operating in the city and many citizens engaged with and through them in the production of services or civic activities, the relation citizen-authority is poorly developed. This is why, in this context, the pandemic has represented a great hurdle when it hit at the beginning of the second year of implementation. To this external constraint, some internal problems added: a significant turnover among Lema staff that is in charge of the participatory process; a lack of a comprehensive and clear strategy for the engagement of individuals and associations; little coordination between the online communication strategy and more traditional communication tools.

Despite these difficulties and blunders, in the last year the three calls for projects and correlated activities have succeeded in making La Ruche a place of reference where a committed group of citizens develops their projects, regular meetings are held to discuss further initiatives, working groups and round tables are organised to address issues and needs of interest for community and Seresian citizens. This accomplishment has been reached in a relatively short time thanks to a change in the approach: a coordinator who was completely dedicated to the assignment, with an assiduous presence on site, a strategy of reaching out every single person or association or public entity likely to give a contribution, express an interest or stimulate new ideas.

Lessons learnt and emerging issues

Given the difficult context, focusing on local associations first and trying to get to citizens through their involvement and intermediation is the solution adopted to keep on going and generate a dynamic process. This strategy has bore fruit at the beginning and has facilitated the flow of information by word of mouth. When the first call for projects was launched, La Ruche had been open for one year for occasional activities and as headquarters of nature-based trainees. The initial opening with little public activities has given the team the time to fine-tune the spatial layout, to test some uses and invite people in step by step, thus providing a friendly place, which could be appreciated since the first call for projects. Also, over the testing period at La Ruche, a charter and some rules were shared and will be easily reintroduced at La Maison du Peuple after the relocation.

In the previous journal we considered two objects of monitoring and evaluation - outputs delivery and project results - for they refer to completely different outcomes of implementation and they are measured according to distinct criteria. If outputs delivery refers to implementation progress in relation to a time schedule and outputs specifications, projects results are measured against a set of identified indicators. We have already seen that project implementation is delayed and the project has been granted one more year: in this last year 2023 all the activities will be completed, with one unknown for the creative station of La Cour des Marêts. The RACI system, which was put in place in 2021 to facilitate the monitoring of project’s outputs for all the partners, was abandoned in this past year because its compilation was perceived by most of the partners more as a burden than a useful tool.

Project results are measured by work package’s objectives, but indicators that assess the integrated dimension of the project have not been defined in in the proposal, with the exception of global indicators (i.e. rate of neighbourhood inhabitants living with a social integration income; rate of inhabitants job seekers who benefit from unemployment allowance…). The challenge is the transfer to the city of a monitoring system that can be adapted to their current competences and is coherent with Seraing’s urban policies. This means that every indicator should be discussed with the municipal department that will be in charge of its collection and analysis.

Lessons learnt and emerging issues

Throughout the project, the monitoring system has somehow evolved: partners tried to adapt their measures to ongoing challenges and when emerging issues demanded new solutions. Therefore, new indicators were studied and proposed to better fit the reality of fieldwork. This was done for example with psychosocial data. It must be noted that psychosocial data are collected and analysed in this project by a partner, the Psy&Cog lab from the University of Liège, which is a specialist of quantitative analysis. When partners are less familiar with methods for collecting and analysing data, a good choice would be to assign the expert partner (or the management team) the coordination of the overall monitoring system in close collaboration with each WP.

As a partner has pointed out during our collective discussion, for a monitoring system to be useful for the assessment of public policies, the indicators must be conceived according to existing urban, social and economic policies, that is, in the case of Seraing, they must be associated to the urban master plan, the social master plan and the territorial strategic plan (PST). This shortcoming can still be addressed in the last months, not to modify the current monitoring system in place, but including as a recommendation in the final report for the handover to the city the creation of a coherent monitoring system which should be based on indicators built thanks to the experience of APTBC project.

The communication strategy that was set up in 2021 was reinforced during 2022 and grew: a particular emphasis was put on reporting about La Ruche à projets, which needed to reach a large audience and maintain a constant flow of information. Generally speaking, for this year the best result of this activity can be seen in the smooth cooperation between the communication team, the other partners and city departments involved in the communication strategy. From La Ruche, to the nature-based initiatives, to the development of the mobile application, to the psychosocial interventions in the parks…every actor involved needed to communicate and everyone had to relate to the communication team and fit in an organic whole.

The big challenge of the past year was the finalisation of the application Seraing en poche, which was expected to become accessible as a mobile application in the first months of 2022. This has not happened because a relentless work of exchange and negotiation with the city departments was unavoidable. To have an all-in-one final product, instead of having to follow and manage many platforms, the city requested that Seraing en poche includes - in addition to the already uploaded repository of local services - the whole website and the necessary widgets to facilitate the relation city-citizens. Transferring the information and the structure of the website to the app proved to be too long and demanding in the remaining time, so the possible launch of a beta version of the app before the end of the project is being discussed and the city wants to look for the necessary funding to update the app when APTBC is closed.

Communication was also a tool used as nudge, as a trigger to increase a feeling of belonging towards Seraing’s central parks. Its results have still to be evaluated, but collaboration was very productive.

Lessons learnt and emerging issues

Communication, as transversal tool, has proved to be able to promote a model of cooperation and co-production that might become ordinary in daily practices at city departments, furthering collaborative projects and the emergence of new ideas and proposals to better serve the common good. We do not know if this approach has been completely acquired and embedded across departments, but in the remaining months it could be sponsored further.

At the same time, a boost toward autonomy and self-management could be given to the group of citizens who are now developing their individual and collective projects at La Ruche; in particular they could be helped to manage independently their communication on the social networks and be trained on how to use and update Seraing en poche. Every effort should be put into a transfer of competences and capacity building for those, municipal officers and involved citizens, who might take over the project’s outcomes and stabilise them.

In Seraing, innovation is dampened by two structural conditions that characterise the municipal services: first, being understaffed leads municipal officers to select their tasks on a basis of urgency but also of habit and familiarity; second, budget deficit limits possibilities for the deployment of new staff, training or material. However, many changes that have been proposed or introduced through the APTBC project do not necessarily require additional costs but mostly a change in practice and approach: this is the case, for example, of the techniques for a sustainable green area management; the update of the communication system; a monitoring system based on already collected data and installed counting posts.

For the upscaling of certain innovative practices that have been introduced by the project, there is still a solution to be found that requires funding, as we will discuss below point by point. It is not impossible to get some extra funding, but the prerequisite is political will and municipal leaders’ determination. The gain would be remarkable, though. On the political side, it is not enough to acknowledge the existence and the appreciation of a place like La Ruche, but it is necessary to take a step further towards its future sustainability. First, some topics - such as biodiversity and the natural capital - are particularly popular these days and can easily be granted attention and funding. Within the framework of the action plan for climate, for example, Seraing can define a strategy to maintain and improve its green areas in the city centre by supporting already trained municipal officials. Second, in Seraing the main policy tools - the urban master plan, the social master plan and the strategic development plan  - should assure the political endorsement of an action plan which includes every action of APTBC and the means of its future upscaling.

Lessons learnt and emerging issues

It is never too late to seriously take into consideration how the project experimental actions will be transposed into policy and everyday practice, of course. In the case of Seraing, even the fact that the objectives of APTBC adhere precisely with those included in the main urban policies, as we have seen, is not enough to assure that continuity and coherence are pursued in the middle-long term. The APTBC team has nonetheless achieved some substantial results through at least three modes of operation: a careful and unremitting work of forging links, building new relations and establishing strong ties; a commitment to transferring knowledge to all the involved stakeholders; the use of errors as a learning tool to advance and adjust their own approach and line of thinking. By getting many relevant different stakeholders together, they put an emphasis on local needs that were somehow unknown or neglected and persuaded everyone, through concrete actions and visible outcomes, to take a change in their activities and even suggest ideas.

Working for the upscaling of the project means to take advantage of every single action and bring its outcomes to a new level. This has happened, to start, with two projects that have been designed and proposed for the FSE grants, which are based on APTBC investigations and its collaboration with CPAS, to develop the missing chains in the field of socio-economic inclusion. Both projects[1] target people with a difficult access to the labour market and who face obstacles to find a sustainable employment.

Parks and green areas in the central neighbourhoods have changed considerably in three years and they are now much more visited and appreciated than they were two years ago. What can hinder the ongoing improvement process is lack of leadership more than anything else. Municipal officers are convinced of the advantages of a sustainable management of parks and have been trained to implement it. Moreover, this method does not require more funding and some advancement can be furthered through external funding that would be quite easy to get. This is why these last months should be devoted to both communicating and lobbying with the aim to generate the broadest possible consensus on the way forward.

La Maison du Peuple is due for completion soon. A small community is born at La Ruche and is eager to engage in the long term. Relocation to the Maison du Peuple is not free from obstacles: first of all the adjustment to a completely new and different spatial layout, where current activities need to re-arrange their organisation and mutual relation. And more importantly, a new coordinator and community manager has to be identified as soon as possible. A few difficulties loom large: the current community manager from the partner Lema ends her collaboration with the APTBC project and someone with the right expertise and experience must take over to arrange and guide the process of relocation and, above all, to follow up on the work of keeping together the newly born community and making it thrive at La Maison du Peuple. What is needed is, first, a selection process that would ideally be designed and accompanied by the current coordinator, and second, the assurance of the necessary funding for the first years of the assignment. This is currently being discussed at the decisional level.

If a process of change has been launched and its cues are detectable in what is today La Ruche à projets - compared to what it was only one year ago - this is only part of the story. As we have pointed out elsewhere, the lack of a participation culture in Seraing is double-headed: on the one hand, we have citizens who are used to deal with public services more as customers than actors, without a strong personal engagement; on the other hand, we have a municipal authority that has still not undertaken a resolute process of releasing and decentralising power to underpin citizens’ agency and empowerment. It is early to say if the pilot project has succeeded in paving the way for this process to be not only activated but also prosecuted. A promising sign in that direction though is the recent new position at Arebs dedicated to participatory activities. The person in charge is expected to develop all the actions that aim to improve and support citizens’ participation in Seraing with a cross-cutting approach.