Generative European Commons Living Lab

2026-07-22

gE.CO Living Lab aims at creating a platform for bringing together and supporting formal groups or informal communities of citizens who manage fab-lab, hubs, incubators, co-creation spaces, social centres created in regenerated urban voids. These innovative practices are considered generative commons, because they are based on sharing and collaboration between citizens and establish a new partnership between Public Institutions and local communities, setting forth new models of governance of the urban dimension based on solidarity, inclusion, participation, economic and environmental sustainability. However, these experiences design a scattered scenario of different legal and economic models which scalability is extremely difficult without appropriate tools. Also, their support through the traditional means of the public runs the risk of compromising their participatory character. To fill these gaps gE.CO built a consortium of experts: Universities and non-profit and for-profit organizations in order to: i) bring together generative commons using a digital platform for collaboration that will map citizens’ initiatives as well as those Public Institutions engaged in new forms of partnership with local communities. This way, generative commons and Public Administrations can finally be connected in a new network able to promote the exchange of good practices and legal solutions; ii) evaluate a group of pilot cases in order to understand which socio-economic, cultural and legal factors make self-organized experiences sustainable and Public Institutions helpful for their development; iii) use the results of the evaluation for scaling up sustainable generative commons and innovative local policies: best practices, recommendations as well as legal solutions will be developed for supporting the emergence of new generative commons through shared, public and open access contents.

Italy, United Kingdom, Greece, Belgium, Spain, Austria

2026-02-01