ABOUT

Project

Co-creating People-Centric Sustainable Neighbourhoods through Urban Regeneration (WeGenerate) is an Innovation Action designed to fully address the topic HORIZON-CL5-2022-D4-02-02 ‘Solutions for the sustainable, resilient, inclusive and accessible regeneration of neighbourhoods enabling low carbon footprint lifestyles and businesses (Built4People)’. 

The project seeks to infuse the elements of people and co-creation in the urban regeneration processes. It fully embraces the paradigm shift from building for the people to building with the people. We – cities, citizens, communities, businesses, researchers, and practitioners – take ownership of the urban regeneration processes and co-create together sustainable, resilient, people-centric, inclusive, accessible, and beautiful neighbourhoods.

The project is about the stories of four neighbourhoods and their communities located in different parts of Europe. Although they are at different stages of development and are facing different challenges but they share the same vision of positive change. WeGenerate will help them to reinvent themselves and in the process find new values and opportunities.

Objectives

 

Objective 1:

Create an "Urban WeGenerate Model" setting out a common methodological approach to guide sustainable and inclusive urban regeneration processes

Objective 2:

Bolster the implementation of integrated climate-neutral transformation within the urban regeneration process

Objective 3:

Mainstream participatory planning practice in the urban regneration process by engaging all relevant stakeholders.

Objective 4:

Catalyse systemic change by scalling up innovations and stimulating structural reform

WeGenerate explores different urban regeneration challenges by integrating climate- responsive technologies and approaches to co-create solutions with people to future- proof their neighbourhoods.

Four diverse WeGenerate Demo Cities spotlight pilot neighbourhoods that exemplify European urban regeneration trends. It is here that local multi-disciplinary city teams (Local Circles) will deeply engage with residents and other stakeholders to tackle their place-based socio-technical challenges with support from the WeGenerate Innovation Hub and each other.
The Innovation Hub has four integrated Solution Clusters:
1. Integrated Planning and Digital Applications
2. Social Innovation and Participatory Actions
3. Energy in the Built Environment
4. Sustainable Mobility

The Innovation Hub’s expert-led clusters serve to inspire, accelerate, aggregate, and amplify innovation across the Demo Cities. They ensure solutions are technically feasible, socially desirable, and aligned with the city’s sustainability ambitions and the European Green Deal.
Demo Cities and their Local Circles will create their own Urban WeGenerate Action Plan and Implementation Roadmap with support from the Innovation Hub. This inclusive process ensures that co-creation, engagement and innovation are embedded in the project’s activities – from conceptualisation to communication to completion.
Following the Implementation Roadmap, the Demo Cities will work towards creating four Sustainable and Inclusive Neighbourhoods, learning and sharing their insights with five WeGenerate Fellow Cities along the way as part of the Fellow Cities Exchange Network. Fellow Cities will explore how the WeGenerate approach can be applied to their own urban context to further inform the Urban WeGenerate Model and improve its replication potential. The Demo Cities’ implementation actions are expected to directly benefit over 550,000 European citizens and contribute to a 20% reduction in local GHG emissions.
A co-created WeGenerate Impact Model will monitor and assess progress towards sustainable and inclusive neighbourhoods. The model includes KPIs across ecological, social, health, and economic categories, ensuring standardised and comparable outcomes between the Demo Cities.
The Demo Cities will share their own Urban WeGenerate Pathway as a transformation story, reflecting on and documenting their WeGenerate journey, as well as noting any new practices or technologies that can be mainstreamed in the municipality's standards and processes to ensure long-term impact at scale. These opportunities will be captured in the Demo City’s “Long-term Sustainability Plan”, which can be then formally adopted into the municipality’s legal and policy frameworks to ensure enduring positive changes. Similarly, the Fellow Cities will produce a Replication Roadmap that establishes a path towards future implementation.
The Demo Cities’ key insights and stories, as well as the reflections from Fellow Cities, will be synthesised into a rich library of sharable resources, including the WeGenerate Solution Booklet, Social Innovation Cookbook, New Business Models and Exploitation Plan, Policy Briefs, and the WeGenerate Compendium – comprised of an Urban WeGenerate Guidance Package and Fellow Cities Replication Case Studies. These resources are targeted to European municipalities and urban change makers to ensure that the technologies, processes, governance models and lessons can be replicated in a variety of urban and cultural environments, as well as governance levels.

DEMO CITIES & FELLOW CITIES

In this map you will find the location of the Demo Cities:

point Bucharest
point Cascais
point Cesena
point Tampere

and the Fellow Cities:

point Cartagena
point Kadıköy
point Liepaja
point Szombathely
point Zagreb

PARTNERS

The WeGenerate project is developed by 21 partners from 9 different countries
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