In this article, one of the chapters published in the report “‘NEXT GENERATION EU’ CITIES. Local Communities in a Post-Pandemic Future” (PDF), Valentina Oquendo, Julio Lumbreras and Jaime Moreno explain how to introduce accelerators successfully in the transformation of cities.
the alignment of urban policies with European strategies like the Next Generation EU funds and the Green New Deal will require attention to acceleration vectors such as systemic innovation, multi-stakeholder partnerships, open and shared knowledge, and multilevel governance.
To introduce these accelerators successfully in the transformation of cities, it is essential to establish spaces for dialogue that stimulate collective learning among the territorial actors involved.
Only in this way can we overcome the inertia of technical and sectoral urban planning and satisfy the real needs of citizens as outlined by the European Cities Mission “100 climate-neutral cities by 2030: by and for citizens”.
This chapter focuses on the possibility to foster simultaneous and coordinated actions to achieve the ecological transition towards climate neutrality. The article shows how some processes are put in place to enable the following goals:
• To design and implement an open systemic innovation platform as a tool for the transformation of participating cities.
• To promote a portfolio of innovation projects directly linked to the aspirations of local citizens.
• To create a network of public and private actors thatwill work as an open innovation platform.
• To identify a set of principles, criteria, and methodologies for urban transformation in Spain and Europe.
• To attract potential funding partners for such processes.
Firstly, we discuss how climate contracts can be seen as an instrument for driving urban transformation. In the second part of the article, we provide two examples of multi-stakeholder partnership developed in Spain, which worked as incubators of transformative projects: The case of the EU Cities Mission Mirror Group in Spain and citiES 2030.
