Research Framework

Project aim

Our overarching goal is to work with municipalities, citizens and transnational municipalist networks to build capacity by forging knowledge networks through living labs and assessing the conditions of success for municipalist policy measures. Our living labs and experiments draw from, and in turn contribute to, local urban innovation ecosystems. Together with our cooperation partners (three municipalities, three civil society organizations, and an international knowledge hub) and local stakeholders (residents, social entrepreneurs and civil society organizations), our living labs will co-create a prototype municipalist innovation in each neighborhood, which will be adapted to the contexts of the other two neighborhoods in an ambitious transnational exchange.

Project objectives

MUNEX is primarily a strategic urban research project with a secondary focus on applied urban research.

Our ‘strategic urban research’ (Objectives 1 and 3) will increase knowledge of how neighborhoods function as innovation ecosystems for municipalist experiments which can be scaled up transnationally.

Our strategic insights will feed directly into ‘applied urban research’ (Objectives 2 and 4). Our applied research will facilitate capacity building by strengthening networks and co-creating policy resources in neighborhoods and internationally.

1. Identifying innovative municipalist experiments in our three case study neighborhoods. We will create an inventory that tracks the development, implementation and effects of municipalist experiments. It will take stock both of experiments that worked and also those that did not, so as to deepen understanding of the conditions for success.
2. Establishing urban living labs in our three case study neighborhoods, bringing together local stakeholders to jointly assess municipalist experiments and propose improvements. Stakeholders will integrate their insights and hone the inventory into a neighborhood-focused policy manual facilitating implementation in practice.
3. Identifying and developing prototype municipalist innovations. In each neighborhood, we co-create a prototype of exemplary municipalist practice with our partners. We will prototype a tool for participatory budgeting in Vienna, a tool for public-communitarian partnerships in Barcelona, and a community organization strategy for inclusive and diverse political cultures in Amsterdam.
4. Establishing policy seminars facilitating the exchange of prototypes between transnational stakeholders in all three cities. These seminars will enable transnational exchange and implementation of the prototypes and inform our final municipalist toolkit in the form of a policy manual to disseminate our results.

From the approach to the realization

In each neighborhood, we will set up living labs to collaborate with local stakeholders to assess and develop municipalist experiments across three crucial domains:

1. Experiments to create inclusive and diverse political cultures. Participation in politics is notoriously uneven, especially in neighborhoods experiencing gentrification. Low-income groups and social minorities are not only at risk of displacement from neighborhoods but also from decision-making on how to make their neighborhoods livable and sustainable.
2. Experiments to empower communities through public-communitarian partnerships. Collective assets such as community centers, heritage and green spaces, can be owned and managed by communities using innovative governance frameworks, such as public-communitarian partnerships.
3. Experiments in participatory budgeting, an instrument that has long been used for the promotion of participatory democracy and that has become integral to municipalist strategies. We examine how this tool can be used to stimulate responses to climate change, which is the focus of participatory budgeting in Vienna.