The Power of Civic Ecosystems

The Power of Civic Ecosystems: How community spaces and their networks make our cities more cooperative, fair and resilient explores methods and practices of building stronger local civic ecosystems around community spaces. The book is based on the experiences of ACTive NGOs, an URBACT network that brought together the municipalities of Riga, Brighton and Hove, Dubrovnik, Espoo, Santa Pola and Siracusa for a 3-year learning process towards creating new platforms for public-civic cooperation.

The Power of Civic Ecosystems also collects inspiring practices from other cities, ranging from municipal policies to citizen initiatives and professional methodologies, exploring mechanisms of stakeholder mapping and ecosystem-building, frameworks to access to public and private spaces, models of economic resilience, structures of participatory governance, and processes of capacity building.

Building on the experiences of the URBACT network ACTive NGOs, the following pages assemble a selection of interviews, analyses, reports, maps and photographs from dozens of European cities, in order to explore how methods of collaboration can help weave a tissue out of the individual threads of initiatives. This collection benefits from a pan-European perspective to look beyond the individual initiatives and organisations, and understand their potential in their connections with other actors. It also offers an overview of a diversity of approaches, mechanisms and methods of connecting different components of local civil society to achieve more together than the sum of their individual accomplishments.