Author: Tamami Komatsu Cipriani
Redesigned by: Carla Álvarez González
How can collaboration and participatory budgeting empower citizens to shape their neighborhoods and drive systemic urban change?
Bologna's Participatory Budget and Collaboration Pacts offer a unique model of how structural changes can create the enabling conditions for citizen mobilization around strategic goals by providing pathways for citizen-led (public) value creation. By providing citizens with the right tools and channels to express, deliberate, and co-design goals from the neighborhood level, the city can engage citizens in civic life by allowing them to solve and prioritize their own needs. As such, the case offers fascinating insight for cities looking to harness collective action and generate innovative solutions to the mission's known and unknown challenges. It also demonstrates the value of creating enabling ecosystems for systemic change.
In 2014, the City of Bologna adopted a new regulation on the management of common goods that established Collaboration Pacts between citizens and the city. The law began a journey towards a new vision of community life in Bologna. The Regulation, along with a re-configuration of the Pubic Administration, was part of the political project "Collaborare è Bologna" ("Collaborating is Bologna") (CB), which sought to foster civic collaboration through material and immaterial tools. The Participatory Budget (PB) builds off the priorities that emerged in the CB project and engages citizens, the six Quarters, and the PA in a collaborative process that enables citizens to decide how to invest an allocated budget of 1 million euros –€150,000 for each Quarter. The process has four steps: the presentation of the proposals, co-design, voting, and implementation, and engages citizens, city officials from the Quarter offices, public sector technicians, and supporting professionals. The first edition took place in 2017 and continues to run annually, despite some setbacks and modifications due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As part of the urban innovation plan, the main focus of the projects has always been on renovating and maintaining urban spaces. However, in recent editions, a new strand of project proposals (community interest projects) responding to strategic priorities identified by the Quarter Councils (e.g. sport, culture, green spaces, education, social services, etc.) with an additional €1 million budget has been provided to give citizens quicker response times between winning and implementing a project.
Impact on climate neutrality
The case demonstrates the power of policy as social innovation, in this case, of engaging citizens in the maintenance of the city and in its social, cultural and economic development. This was accomplished through policy tools like the Participatory Budget, that serve to activate policy (e.g. the Regulation on Common Goods) and through the establishment of Quarter labs that engage and activate citizenship in the city’s districts, while building capacity in the population and in the civil service. The process thus accelerates the network serendipity of the ecosystem and supports distributed agency in shared goals for the community. Through intense dialogue between city officials and citizens, policymakers are directed to take ownership of specific problems and commit to pushing along the agenda. The program naturally lends to diffusing social innovation and nudging behavioural changes through empowerment. While the case is not directly related to Climate-neutral Cities by 2030 EU Mission, it provides a powerful example of how the concerted effort of top-down (policy measures) and bottom-up measures (the collaboration pacts/participatory budgeting activities) can mobilise communities towards a common objective. Such tactics are directly useful for prompting system change in cities and ensuring a just transition toward climate neutrality.
An innovative approach
There are several elements that mark this case of Social Innovation as exemplary for its innovative approach to urban regeneration that could be useful in similar approaches seeking to unite actors around a common vision and goal. The first is the participatory approach to policymaking that was at the core of the founding political program, centred around building a collaborative city.
The unifying element can be seen in the use of participatory methods to engage and onboard stakeholders in the implementation of the vision. This approach was adopted at various moments, starting with six co-creation sessions to map funding priorities that guided the design of the Urban Innovation Plan. The Quarter Labs, established to support Quarters after their re-zoning and role change (from distributed city council centres to territorial agents responsible for activating citizen-city collaboration), use participatory design methods as part of their ‘territory-making’ activities and as part of the participatory budget process.
Within the participatory budget process itself, other approaches to engage citizens in urban planning and revitalisation efforts can be seen in various moments: co-defining the quarter’s strategic targets (shaping the call for the budget); shared decision-making at each step both in-person at general assembly meetings and online on the city’s digital platform; and shared management and monitoring of the project’s implementation.
Main positive lessons
- High engagement of citizens in strategic planning of city-wide goals
- Practical measure to build territorial capacity amongst actors
- Easily replicable in other contexts
Main barriers found
- Vulnerable to political turnover
- Risk of losing citizen trust due to long implementation times of urban projects
- Difficulties in finding a shared language and calibrated expectations between citizens and public technicians
Potential for replication and scale-up
The participatory model in Bologna offers a scalable and adaptable framework for cities aiming to enhance citizen engagement and governance. Its success depends on political commitment, appropriate infrastructure, and localized capacity-building. The initiative’s regulatory foundation and practical methodologies, including co-creation sessions and digital tools, have already inspired adoption in other Italian and European cities, making it a promising template for global application in diverse urban contexts.
All images on this site are sourced from https://www.comune.bologna.it.