R-Urban - a participative strategy of urban resilience in suburban neighbourhoods

R-Urban strategy proposes the creation of a network of citizen projects and grass¬roots organisations around a network of collective civic hubs hosting economic and cultural activities and everyday life produc¬tive practices that contribute to increasing resilience within an urban context. The hubs are key in providing the infrastructure for this change and offering space, training and capacity building for resilient practices to emerge and strategically connect to each other. The network, which functions through locally closed circuits, starts at the neighbourhood level and progressively scales up at the city and region level. Differently with other regeneration projects conceived by specialist teams and facil¬itated by managerial structures, here the architects play an active role as initiators, facilitators, medi¬ators within various civic partnerships instigated by the project. This results into a more effective, quicker and sustainable implementation, and allows for a larger participation of non specialists and ordinary citizen in the co-production of the project. The R-Urban organization involves forms of commoning, ways of ensuring the expan¬sion and sustainability of the common pool resources but also ways of being-in-com¬mon as a social and ecological practice based on societal values produced by the civil society. R-Urban started to be concretely imple¬mented in Colombes, a suburban town in the North West of Paris in 2011 in partner¬ship with the Municipality of Colombes within the framework of a EC funded Life+ project, with a component being parallely implemented in Hackney Wick London, in partnership with Public Works. Two hubs – Agrocite and Recyclab- have been built in Colombes and one hub – Wick on Wheels- in London. AgroCité - a unit of urban agriculture - consists of a micro-experimental farm, community gardens, educational and cultural spaces and devices for energy production, composting and rainwater recycling. RecyLab is a recycling and green building constructed around a series of equipment for the recycling of urban waste and turning them into materials for eco-construction. WOW is a unit of mobile production which operates in Hackney Wick (London, UK) and its surrounding area. This unit encourages collective production in situ, using local materials, resources and knowledge. It is a participatory project, which engages with inhabitants and local artisans to produce, reuse and repurpose. The units operate through local production-distribution cycles and is gradually connected with other urban facilities, helping to increase the capacity of urban resilience in the neighborhood (self-sufficiency, production and recycling to local and regional levels, etc.). R-URBAN is supported by the EU Life + Programme of environmental governance. The project partners are AAA (coordinator) and the City of Colombes (for the two pilot units) and Public Works, London (for a mobile unit). A network of partners is being formed for the dissemination of the R-URBAN strategy on larger scale by including partners from Belgium, Spain, Romania, Germany, etc. R-urban has received the Zumtobel prize for research and iintiative 2012 and has been finalist at the EIB social innovation tournament.