The publication looks at social innovation from the point of view of cities. Social innovation is intended here to mean innovative solutions, new forms of organisation and new interactions to tackle social issues. In particular, it focuses on
innovative solutions in terms of the governance of cities: new forms of collaboration between the city administration, citizens and local stakeholders which can generate more sustainable, resilient and open systems at city level.

Among numerous others, the publication also includes good practice case studies from Hungary, from the town of Gödöllő where the municipality established and partly maintains an NGO House, and from the 18th district of Budapest where the municipality has created and supported several community gardens.

Edina Vadovics from GreenDependent was a key expert in the EU project (URBACT Capitalization: Social Innovation in Cities) studying, evaluating and promoting social innovation in cities. The objective of the project was to collect and evaluate the social innovation related experience in projects supported through the URBACT framework, supplement them with experience from similar programmes in order to reflect on the lessons learnt and ensure that other cities can benefit from these experiences and adapt  to their own context the solutions to urban challenges developed within the programme.

In particular, the capitalisation process aimed to consolidate and disseminate practical knowledge on sustainable urban policies while creating a new knowledge on the basis of the URBACT experiences produced within the projects but also on the basis of existing experience and knowledge coming from similar or complementary European projects/ programmes outside the URBACT programme. As a mean to foster mainstreaming of best practices and policy recommendations, the dissemination of this new knowledge follows each phase of Capitalisation.

If you want to find out more about the project, read related materials and learn about good practice case studies, please visit THIS LINK.

The pulication can be downloaded from HERE.

(in the picture you can see the expert team of the project)