The ideal city does not exist, nor does the single pathway to climate neutrality or the ideal social innovation process. Every city has a different context, scale, history and people, and hence different concrete challenges. Every city finds itself at a different stage in a trajectory towards climate neutrality, and the trajectories themselves differ from city to city. Yet those contexts are often comparable and the challenges typically relate to known transition bottlenecks – challenges in changing behaviour, setting long-term goals, finding money and overcoming regulatory barriers and disciplinary silos.
CrAFt directly targets these transition bottlenecks to support cities in developing and deploying collaborative local governance models that will accelerate their journeys towards climate neutrality – regardless of their point of departure. CrAFt builds a bridge between the EU Cities Mission and the New European Bauhaus initiative, by:
-Harvesting experiences from the Cities as a Commons framework, that can be used in the design and deployment of Climate City Contracts;
-Publishing 3 CrAFt Cookbooks for Climate-Positive Cities and Communities, with 160 innovative and collaborative local governance models, tools, stories, good practices and guidelines based on NEB values and principles;
-Working with 3 Sandbox Cities (Amsterdam, Bologna, and Prague) to co-create and test how NEB-inspired collaborative local governance models can support local authorities in identifying stakeholder needs and matching them with concrete opportunities;
-Building a community of 70+ CrAFt Cities in which we support social and organisational learning in urban innovation and demonstration projects – within the city and between cities – through cooperation with arts, cultural and creative sectors, inhabitants and communities;
-Creating student STEAM teams (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) and Think/Do Tanks to involve students from all disciplines in all aspects of the project to achieve a bottom-up involvement of the generation that will be tackling the challenges of the future;
-Supporting awareness raising, mobilisation and agenda setting through a Europe-wide multimedia storytelling campaign that leaves no one behind, combined with policy support and advice for the European Commission, Member States and Associated Countries, and local and regional authorities engaged in the project
-Creating a NEB Alliance of projects, platforms and networks working with the EU Cities Mission and NEB, to achieve a bigger impact - and be louder together
