Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana (FIU)

In 2003 Urban Centre Bologna was formed to communicate with citizens how the city was changing regarding a new mobility masterplan and other urban planning strategies promoted by the municipality. In 2014, the city council passed the “regulation on public collaboration between citizens and the city for the care and regeneration of urban commons,” which allowed citizens and private organizations to sign collaboration pacts with the city in order to improve public space, green areas, and abandoned buildings. In 2017, Bologna’s government launched a participatory budgeting process, inviting citizens to submit proposals for projects that would engage residents and reimagine the urban commons (Cities of Service, 2024).

As an evolution of these efforts, the Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana (FIU) was founded by the city of Bologna to promote "relationships between local government, universities, firms, the tertiary sector and citizens" (FIU, 2024). The goal has been to produce better communication instruments and to foster social equity, cultural innovation and the transition to climate neutrality by identifying the most effective methodologies for citizen participation in local urban regeneration stratefies. The FIU uses different tools to foster citizen participation and collaboration with other local stakeholders and academic/research organisations in decision-making processes. It is structured by different research centres and departments working with the underlying regulatory framework titled the Urban Innovation Plan, linked with the Participatory Budget, which connects public policy with collaborative governance/co-production methods.      

By using the Urban Living Lab methodoly, the aim was to stimulate and guide experimentation and innovation projects in the regeneration of spaces and buildings of public interest. The FIU organised District Laboratories (FIU, 2024) and used participation and co-production to reveal priorities and lead to participatory budgeting for making improvements to public spaces, organising events to accompany and strengthen the transformation of public spaces, collaboratively and based on local needs (D’alena et al., 2018).

For the year 2023, the city provided a budget of three million euros (five hundred thousand euros per neighbourhood) to fund the proposals born out of the visions of active citizens. Proposals were submitted online or at neighbourhood workshops scheduled in the evenings on specific days. After this first stage, the co-design phase finalised the proposals with the support of municipal technical staff and finally the voting phase outlined the six winning projects to be undertaken (Bologna Comune, 2024). The proposals include cultural, artistic and material interventions for regeneration of urban spaces, the enhancement of green areas or public gardens and in general to promote the right to urban public spaces which are open and collaborative.

In this strategic experiment pioneered by the city of Bologna, the principles of the urban commons are able to be institutionalised by political advocacy groups and active citizens who are grounded in the territory of their respective community, while also able to reach the level of municipal process. This has been possible due to the municipality guaranteeing the conditions for intermediaries to have access to several financing tools that facilitate network building opportunities and the up-scaling of local actions.

Sustainable cities and communities

Climate action