Energy Transition in Europe | www.energy-cities.eu

Dublin City Neighbourhoods Competition is an annual contest, organized by Dublin City Council. It recognizes the efforts of residents, associations, communities, businesses and schools to enhance their living environment. What is more, the competition aims to foster a sense of civic pride, place and community and to promote environmental awareness emphasizing on joint voluntary effort. The competition could distinguish anything from a well-maintained garden and shop front to waste management, energy efficiency initiatives and environmental projects in schools, business, private residences.

LE CERCLE/POINT DE VUE - Les villes dotées des dernières innovations technologiques ne sont pas forcément les plus intelligentes, affirme Pascual Berrone. Pour le coauteur de l'indice IESE Cities in Motion, la « smart city » est celle dont la gouvernance est capable de conduire des politiques équilibrées.

The Citizens’ Assembly spearheaded Ireland’s vote to overturn an abortion ban in 2018, after a similar public consultation led to the vote to allow same-sex marriage in 2015. Now, the assembly could force Dublin’s hand on divisive and expensive new measures to tackle climate change, including raising the carbon tax on road fuels and extending it to agricultural emissions.

Real Democracy in Your Town: Public-Civic Partnerships in Action explores the potential of public-civil partnerships (as opposed to the conventional public-private partnerships), as an opportunity to provide basic public services within societies without the privitisation of public goods and making them subjects of the free market.
It particularly focuses on the power of municipalist and local citizens’ movements and highlights successful case studies in Europe from which to draw inspiration from.

Thirty-one apartment buildings comprising 140,000 m2 of floor space: Europe’s most ambitious energy-saving renovation project is transforming Torrelago, a residential district of Valladolid in central Spain.
The sheer scale of the upgrade makes it the one of the largest such projects ever supported by the European Union. But what makes this case unique is that its 1,488 apartments are not the property of the local authority but are privately owned, and that the co-financing element has been provided by the residents themselves.

The outcomes of the “European and US stories of CHANGE!”
We often tend to speak about community engagement like a mantra, but it is indeed the core element of collaborative public policies. Before rejecting the idea to engage citizens into the service delivery, because it seems too hard, we need to think critically about the way in which public services are currently delivered and how effective they are at meeting people’s needs. Perhaps it is possible to improve collaboration? At URBACT City Festival 2018, the joint workshop of the CHANGE! network and Cities of Service offered some solutions by highlighting a theoretical method: CHANGE! that partner cities found useful and a concrete initiative hundreds of US cities appreciate, now reaching Europe.

It’s the people living in the affected communities who experience what the author Rebecca Solnit calls disaster collectivism.

Si le recul de la participation au suffrage universel et le déclin des adhésions aux organisations représentatives semblaient traduire le désengagement des citoyens de la vie politique, la multiplication des initiatives citoyennes indique bien davantage sa mutation. Pour restituer la pluralité de ces initiatives, leur nature et leur visée, la notion de « pratiques politiques autonomes » semble être la plus appropriée. Mais, libérées des règles du jeu instituées par les régimes de gouvernement représentatif, de quelle légitimité peuvent-elle se revendiquer ?

La démocratie participative est une voie fréquemment empruntée par les dirigeants en contexte de crise, dans les organisations comme dans les États. Si elle constitue un puissant outil pour susciter de la satisfaction, de l'adhésion et, en un mot, éviter les révolutions, elle semble pourtant, en pratique, condamnée à échouer.

The success of energy transformation depends on the ability of local and regional authorities to manage this change at the local and regional levels, starting with best practices, but with understanding local limitations and obstacles. This requires energy transformation to be planned, managed, implemented and communicated in the right way, making full use of innovation in technology and processes.
To achieve these objectives, it is important that all citizens and all levels of governance are on board. That is why energy transformation must be a fair transition.
In response to these challenges, the European Committee of the Regions is currently preparing two opinions:
• The socioeconomic transformation of coal regions in Europe, rapporteur Mr. Mark Speich (DE/EPP)
• Implementation of the Paris Agreement through innovative and sustainable energy transition at regional and local level, rapporteur Mr. Witold Stępień (PL/EPP)
Both rapporteurs strive for the highest possible quality input and widest range of different views for their opinions.
We believe your expertise would greatly contribute to achieving this objective.

Barcelona residents had until the end of January to submit suggestions for a plan to redevelop the green spaces of Montjuic, an iconic hill overlooking the Catalan capital.

Few people live on Montjuic itself, which sports a stadium built for the 1992 Olympic Games alongside museums, a castle and recreational areas, but there are dense residential streets at the bottom of the hill.

Inhabitants of those neighbourhoods were given the chance to add their ideas on things like transport and environmental protection - both online and at meetings - to a draft of the city council’s action plan for Montjuic.

Barcelona often uses inclusive processes like this to gather citizens’ input on municipal projects - a trend that is growing worldwide at city and national levels.

Civic engagement, participation and democratization of decision making processes are core features for novel governance approaches to tackle complexities such as complex spatial questions. However, communicative and engaging activities are often experienced as usatisfactory by citizens. This is an issue the JPI Urban Europe project Play!UC have addressed by developing a series of serious games in urban development.

More than 120 000 Paris citizens have voted in September for the participatory budgeting of the city. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, and Pauline Veron, in charge with local democracy and participation, have announced the winning project on the 2nd of October. Over 31.7 millions euro are going to be invested in energy efficiency, cleanliness, improved access to sports activities, medical care and mobility.

From the USA to Spain and beyond, the last decade has seen a surge in municipalist and local democracy citizens’ movements. Many have been influenced by the ideas of American writer and thinker Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), which envisaged a new left politics based on popular assemblies and grassroots democracy. We sat down with Debbie Bookchin to discuss how these movements are implementing her father’s ideas and what the potential challenges are for libertarian municipalism.

The New Localism provides a roadmap for change that starts in the communities where most people live and work.

In their new book, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges.

Power is shifting in the world: downward from national governments and states to cities and metropolitan communities; horizontally from the public sector to networks of public, private and civic actors; and globally along circuits of capital, trade, and innovation.