Summary of recommendations

As simple as it sounds, the four principles of integrated territorial development can serve as dimensions for guiding your process of co-designing the project. Thus, one can use:

• Place-based principle to decide the territory, collect data on it, and understand its assets and challenges;
• Multi-stakeholder and multi -level principle when deciding which partners to bring on board;
• Participative approach principle on how to engage with citizens and service users;
• Cross-sectoral principle when deciding which policies to combine.

Not all solutions exist at the same level as the problems they address. Cities can target particular neighbourhoods while also focusing on a wider area such as the municipality.

Cross-sectoral integration does not happen by chance, it is a conscious decision and process starting from the projects’ co-design. It often requires a facilitator or convenor that has the capacity to work through traditionally separated policies or departments or organisations. Often this requires that the facilitator is seen as independent from any individual department or agency agenda, but as a trust-worthy mediator. They can be based either inside or outside the organisation.

Past European projects or large-scale competitions (such as European Capital of Culture, European Capital of Innovation or European Youth Capital) often generate diverse local partnerships. Evidence from UIA cities, such as DARE, Ravenna and CFW, Cluj-Napoca, shows that it is best to build on these existing alliances or sometimes on the momentum they generated locally, in order to advocate for bolder and more innovative actions. Make sure you mapped existing initiatives so that you know what already happened.

Urban authorities often make use of legislative and fiscal incentives and disincentives to achieve policy goals.  This is done either by making certain behaviours illegal or more costly. Nudges are a form of incentive that can be considered for generating behaviour change and are highly relevant at the territorial level. These have included reward schemes in Lahti and Viladecans to promote low carbon mobility, and energy efficiency respectively.   

In some sectors such as creative industries where many small operators are active it can help to work through umbrella organisations (see the Cluj Cultural Centre, the Société par Actions Simplifiée in Lyon Métropole or the Association of Tuscan municipalities in Prato).

High quality up-to-date granular data is necessary for implementing the place-based approach. Most data sets are produced by national government levels and they may need to be convinced to add more spatial breakdown to datasets on topics like unemployment (granularity). New forms of local data are often available in real time such as mobile phone movement data and energy consumption from smart meters. However, there are also licensing, confidentiality and security issues - see Vilawatt, Viladecans and CitiCap Lahti.

New interfaces can be either external to the local authority or internal. Arms-length organisations connected to the municipality but operating with relative autonomy can act as interfaces between municipal departments and other urban stakeholders, allowing for better horizontal cooperation during implementation. The membership needs to go beyond the usual suspects. By assigning powerful roles to civil society partners new avenues are opened. Some of the most innovative and inclusive UIA projects have operated in such semi-detached organisational spaces. (See the Cluj Cultural Centre or CIKE and the Citizen Experience and Well-being Institute in Košice (Košice 2.0), see Viladecans (Vilawatt) form of management of its PPCP - public private citizen partnership). Complex project implementations require a high level of partnership working and clear roles for each partner with a tight coordination from the lead partner - see CFW, Cluj working with Cluj cultural sector.

The implementation of complex, multi-stakeholder projects require high levels of cooperation: this requires tight coordination by the Lead Partner, dedicated resources and designation of clear roles for each partner as well as good communication and decision-making structures - see Société par Actions Simplifiée in Home Silk Road Lyon Métropole or POST and DARE Redazione in Ravenna.  Use online platforms to improve horizontal cooperation see DARE - Darsena Ravenna Approdo Comune, Prato Urban Jungle City or the Nordic Innovation Accelerator in CitiCap in Lahti.

Facilitating a public meeting on a hot topic can be a daunting experience but there are methods and techniques which UIA projects used to reduce the temperature and improve collaboration.  When Prato Urban Jungle started they found they lacked people with these skills.  Moreover when they held a meeting with tenants of the San Giusto housing estate they  found that the tenants had their own priorities for the area. 

The reality of an innovative and integrated project means that new information and challenges will surface during the implementation. By fostering  a management culture that allows constant feedback, and also developing mechanisms in which project stakeholders can make adjustments to the original implementation plan can improve the resilience of the project. See OASIS in Paris and Home Silk Road in the Lyon Metropole.

Putting citizens at the centre of the project can promote behavioural change and interest in city governance, and enables authorities to better align services and urban policies to citizens' needs and aspirations - see APPLAUSE in Ljubljana and Air Heritage in Portici. These are skills that can be improved and higher level institutions (regional, national and EU) can play a role in raising the level. A good example of such capacity building is URBACT through its Summer/ and E University programme (see chapter 3).

For any Administration it is important to understand the organisational changes that are needed from the outset to replicate the actions of a project previously implemented elsewhere. For this reason, it is important to anticipate, at the application stage, the human resources, capacity and skills that will be needed to replicate the project, or part of its actions (see chapter 6).  Viladecans has mainstreamed the approach practised in its Vilawatt project across seven policy fields for the city.

Evaluating urban projects in the light of ITD requires a clear framework that goes beyond thematic innovation (housing, air quality, culture, etc.). It needs to involve partners and measure processes in the space between municipality, civil society, and private partners. In this respect looking closely at how the four principles have been addressed is an essential part of the evaluation - see for example the Utrecht Plan Einstein.

Start evaluations early and let them run as an ongoing process, and use feedback as a pathway to change. This allows the participation of stakeholders and ensures that the learning feeds back into the project as it develops.

Whether by creating composite indicators that measure results across different sectoral policies or by using new data (e.g. from phone apps) there needs to be better evidence that integrated territorial approaches are effective and add value compared to a sectoral approach.

Make contact with ERDF programme managers at regional/national level to understand how programme priorities and financial resources could be mobilised for the continuation of the project at greater scale, or in more locations.

Managing Authorities should consider how to adapt their selection criteria to include and score the four principles of integrated territorial development so that projects that have taken account of multiple factors are chosen. 

Urban innovations take place in a specific place with its own challenges, culture, institutional structure and people. First mover projects have a particular dynamic which is hard to reproduce a second time around. Some types of actions are easier to replicate than others. Repeating this action somewhere else can be difficult although this depends on the nature of the project. Replicating the school yard improvements in Paris Oasis may be easier than transferring the alternative currency from Vilawatt in Viladecans to another country where tax and social security are different. In general, there are no simple copy and paste solutions.

Organisations at higher levels can stimulate transfer through funding and support. URBACT has experimented with transfer networks based on UIA projects and is evaluating the results. More could be done to influence the next generation of integrated sustainable urban development programmes to adopt innovations that have been tested by UIA.

Include partnerships with national relays (e.g. URBACT contact points, European Urban Initiative relays, City associations). Make sure that the plan has resources to support it.

As seen in the cases of Viladecans Vilawatt, Ljubljana APPLAUSE, and Paris OASIS, sustainability and transferability of projects is more effective when the work done during the UIA funding period becomes a starting point for other local policies capitalising on the UIA experience.

Other cities are interested in learning about how to design and implement innovative approaches because they address similar challenges. These strategies have been used by Vilawatt in Viladecans and USE-IT! in Birmingham through the URBACT transfer networks that they lead. Paris Oasis has built a strong following of nearly 100 cities in France as well as hosting visits from countries in and beyond the EU. Other opportunities are available in ESF Plus, Horizon Europe and in other transnational programmes.

Integrated territorial development traditionally focused on deprived neighbourhoods and there are decades of practice out there. Newer themes such as digital transition, or nature based solutions may need more support. There is a widespread need for capacity building and training in facilitation, new forms of leadership and cross-sectoral working.