Neighbourhood empowerment

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The Europe 2020 strategy promotes a “smart, sustainable and inclusive economy” for Europe. Yet observations show that more and more urban territories and their populations are excluded from the mainstream economic growth dynamics. Furthermore, the gap between successful territories and territories experiencing decline is continuously increasing. Smart sustainable development thus seems to be reserved to ‘wealthy’ territories (and populations), when others concentrate environmental and social problems. Especially at the level of the city and even in cities considered as ‘successful’, observations show that without any public intervention, inequalities between the different neighbourhoods (environmental, economical and social inequalities) tend to increase. The main objective of the N-POWER project is to support innovative ‘neighbourhood development policies’ enabling the EMR cities to effectively reintegrate their ‘excluded’ neighbourhoods and populations in a creative, inclusive and sustainable development pathway. This will not only contribute to the reduction of environmental inequalities between neighbourhoods and to the economic revitalisation of the deprived neighbourhoods through the creation of new local activities and jobs, but also, to the social development of neighbourhoods (through effects in terms of e.g. community learning, social integration, social cohesion and collective organisational capacity). The N-POWER project will thus jointly work on environmental, social and economic reintegration of the excluded neighbourhoods and their inhabitants. To reach this objective, N-POWER will build on a strong partnership issued from all EMR regions, associating local public authorities (main and second tier EMR cities) and key research and education partners (+ RIMO Limburg as associated partner). The main activities that will be implemented by the N-POWER project and the expected results are structured along 3 main WPs: WP T1 - Training programme & material: A training programme will be offered to all stakeholders concerned by neighbourhood development policies (local elected officials, local officers, social workers, etc.) in order to improve these policies in the sense that they better contribute to social integration of citizens, collective capacity building and empowerment within the neighbourhoods. This training programme builds, inter alia, on the results of the former SUN project which developed innovative methods to engage local citizens in the sustainable transition of their neighbourhood. The N-POWER project will go a step forward by focussing on the transfer and dissemination of the best citizens’ empowerment approaches, based on the lessons learned from the SUN project and from other projects. One of the main outputs of the WP will be a ready-to-transfer « training & education package » including guidance, online courses, etc. WP I1 - Pilot empowerment projects: the same stakeholders (local elected officials, local officers, social workers, etc.) will be invited to apply these empowerment approaches through concrete pilot projects in the neighbourhoods chosen as laboratories, in order to ‘learn by doing’ (the practical side of learning); these pilots are part of a euregional experiment and will be collectively evaluated and compared by the research partners, in order to serve as an input for the training and education material developed under WP T1 (key lessons, demonstration and illustration role). WP T2 - Innovative funding: the structural funding of the neighbourhood development policies tend to decrease and is anyway not sufficient to finance new neighbourhood empowerment projects, so N-POWER will explore how to raise complementary funding for these projects (e.g. crowdfunding campaigns, voluntary work and services provided by private companies, sponsoring, etc.); at least two fundraising models will be tested during the N-POWER project, and the money raised will be used to finance other neighbourhood empowerment projects than the ones implemented under WP I1. The main output of this WP will be sustainable partnerships with existing fundraising organisations enabling to secure funding for future neighbourhood empowerment projects. The transborder cooperation brings an added value for the development of the training programme and related educational material (cities and partners having different and complementary knowledge and know-how), for the development and evaluation of the pilot empowerment pilots (which are part of a cross-regional comparative experiment) and for the development of innovative funding approaches (partners having different levels of experience with these).

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