The financial crisis raised limitations to city planning, but innovative approaches channeling bottom-up initiatives into large-scale programmes could help overcome challenges – informs MRI Managing Director Iván Tosics’s recent article on the URBACT website.
Due to the financial crisis, heavily indebted public actors are not able any more to launch large-scale programmes to handle difficult environmental problems. Thus they have to find new, innovative ways, have to experiment with more flexible environmental standards and regulations.
The article presents a selection of promising innovative practices, including socially and environmentally conscious new initiatives on the former shipyard areas of Amsterdam North: a large industrial hall converted by artists; flexible regulation allowing individual residential construction; temporary use on a heavily polluted site; and inclusive projects from Leipzig, including neighbourhood gardening and opening former industrial zones to the public, and reutilizing them for community purposes, turning groups of the local community into co-developers. The underlying philosophy of these interventions was best summarized by Giovanni Caudo, a politician from Rome: in crisis times flexibility is the best way for local municipalities to re-capitalize under-used assets and mobilize citizens.
