January 24th 2014
Sala Piamarta, Via San Faustino 70
Brescia

Event Description

The WILCO Brescia team organised a public seminar in collaboration with the Brescia City Council Department for Social Services and Family Policies. The title of the seminar was: “Cities between vulnerability and innovation. Elements for a discussion stemming from a European research“. Social assistants and social workers of the Municipality of Brescia were invited to assist the seminar as a training occasion.

The focus of the seminar was manifold:

• First, objectives, methodology and steps of the research project were presented.

• Second, comparative research results from WP3 were presented, with particular reference to labour and housing markets and policies. The case of Brescia, a Southern European city with segmented social policies, was presented in the context of the other European 19 cities involved in the research, and of their respective national welfare system.

• Third, research results from WP5, and particularly cases of social innovation in The Netherlands, were offered as examples from other contexts. Francesca Broersma presented three cases of local innovation: “BOOT – Neighbourhood Stores for Education, Research and Talent Development” and “Neighbourhood Mothers Catering” in Amsterdam, and the “Work corporations” in Nijmegen. Analysis emphasised the relation between universities and neighbourhoods, in order to identify services that are really needed at the very local level (for BOOT); the collaboration between public and private actors; the focus on people’s competences, instead of their lacunae; the commercial approach of some of the projects (the objective to make a profit, to be reinvested in the projects themselves) in order to guarantee their sustainability and continuity in time.

• Fourth, representatives of the bodies carrying out the activities selected as local innovation case studies were invited to a roundtable to discuss about facts, criticism and possible perspectives of innovation (see the list in the programme below). The consequences of the crisis in the local area were discussed, particularly how the loss of jobs of breadwinners has provoked in some cases the loss of the family dwelling as well, putting higher pressure on the local housing policies. Another consequence is related to the fact that many young people are unemployed and still live with their parents, who cannot correspond to their high expectations in terms of living standards. The presence of many innovations in local programs in the Brescia area was underlined, but of very small size and highly fragmented, also because of the narcissism of local actors. The need to overcome the discouragement of both individuals and organizations was highlighted. The drastic reduction of resources was said to call for innovation in the “production of welfare”, in order to reduce the cost of welfare services without reducing their quality. In particular, bureaucratic regulation should be updated and simplified. The role of the Municipality will increasingly be one of coordination rather than of direct production.

• Finally, the implications in terms of social investment were recalled, and the need for the development of “active social policies” was underlined.

PROGRAMME
9:45 Introduction, Costanzo Ranci, Polytechnic of Milan
10:00 Social vulnerability in European cities: labour market and access to housing, Stefania Sabatinelli and Giuliana Costa, Polytechnic of Milan
11:00 Social innovation in European cities. Ideas from the Netherlands, Francesca Broersma, Radboud University Nijmegen
11:30 Roundtable: Social innovation in Brescia: experiences, criticalities, perspectives. Chair: Costanzo Ranci, Polytechnic of Milan. Interventions of: Felice Scalvini, City Councillor of Brescia for Policies for the Family, the Person, the Health; Achille Gasparotti, Province of Brescia; Alessandro Augelli, Informagiovani and Cooperativa Il Calabrone; Michele Bordin, Associazione Bimbo Chiama Bimbo; Manuela Archetti, Immobiliare Sociale Bresciana.
12:30 Discussion

RESOURCES

Four power point presentations delivered in Italian are available for download as pdf:

WILCO Brescia 1 welfare and cohesion 53KB

WILCO Brescia 2 labour market 442KB

WILCO Brescia 3 housing 123KB

WILCO Brescia 4 housing netherlands 98KB

The post “Cities between vulnerability and innovation” – Brescia Grassroots Event appeared first on Wilco Project.

This series of WILCO Project local studies of policy orientations and values contributes to the understanding of the role of policy ideas, orientations and values in the interplay with innovations for social cohesion. Innovative approaches are usually not mainstream but can be linked to mainstream politics as part of a reform approach in the political administrative system (PAS), be co-funded by it or simply link to it as criticism, suggestions and messages that come from the innovators.

Certain concerns shape inquiry and analysis of welfare innovation in its political context:

• Plurality of discourses: for understanding the interplay of politics and innovations it is important to see them in a tension field structured by the juxtaposition and rivalry of different discourses;
• The impact of history: practices and values that guide action and politics are very much coined by historical developments and experiences;
• Differences between policy fields: While there may be often a kind of overarching narrative, shaped by national politics and dominating local coalitions, due to a number of factors, situations in different policy field may vary;
• Political administrative system and welfare system: understanding a welfare system as large and mixed, comprising of the fields family and community, business sector and third sector of associations we look at welfare developments and their role as part of a mixed and encompassing welfare system.

The English of this report series has not been edited yet.

Brescia City Report 729KB

The post City Report on the Interplay of Innovation and Local Welfare System: Brescia appeared first on Wilco Project.

Local contexts are important in order to understand innovations and change on the local level:

Innovations are embedded in local welfare discourses that can be about classical welfare issues, managerial or encourage participation and pluralism. Such discourses will influence the political opportunity structures for social innovation.

In addition to that, there is a level of historical path-dependency that determines innovation success to some extent.

Welfare is a complex system that encompasses different administrative welfare units as much as the general political system. Innovations should be understood in relation to this complex environment.
Finally, innovative ideas might be restricted by the locally prevailing general discourse but may get much endorsement by a community of experts in a special policy field and thus reduce limits for innovative concepts.

Among the many context factors that have an impact on innovations and their further development, the strategies and value orientations of the local political administrative system are still of central importance. Local politics and governance include increasingly interactions with partners reaching from casual arrangements and agreements in networks over to cross-sector partnerships and corporatist frameworks.

Even though welfare innovations are in many ways nationally and locally specific, there are traits of innovations that are international in character:

Innovations entail approaches and instruments that enrich and change the classical tool kits of social welfare and service policies, e.g. developing services that give personalized bundles of support or creating new forms of social investments into people’s capabilities.

They entail innovations in public governance to various degrees, i.e. when networks and coalition are built across departments and sectors are part of many innovative projects and sometimes even “meta-governance” takes new forms of deliberation and consent finding in search for the public good.
Shared features point to the links between these innovations and post-traditional welfare concepts: services that address the strengths and not merely the weaknesses of their target groups are examples for enabling welfare concepts and the ways new services are more family minded, personalized, but tie in people’s support networks contributes to an upgrading of the role of communities in mixed welfare systems

What role can innovative organisations play within these forms of governance and policy-making? Pointing at the innovative quality of organisations and projects can give additional support for developing policies that give social innovation a place in the overall changing architecture of welfare governance. This series of city reports offers an insight in many inspiring social and public innovations that offer plenty food for thought and further analysis.

Brescia report on innovations 807KB

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January 24, 2014
9.45am – 1pm
Sala Piamarta,
Via San Faustino, Brescia

Event Description

The event is titled “The City between Vulnerability and Innovation” and will address policy-makers, scholars, civil society activists and the interested public.

Click below for the programme (in Italian):

WILCO_brescia-seminario

The post Brescia Grassroots Meeting on appeared first on Wilco Project.

This city report maps the problems of social inequality and cohesion at the local level, as the background for the research on local social innovations in the subsequent part of the project. The report includes

• (1) an analysis of the main characteristics and trends of the local labour market (main sectors, employment and unemployment levels, groups of population mainly affected by long-term unemployment);
• (2) an analysis of demographic structure of the population and of the trends taking place in the preceding ten years (proportion of the elderly, fertility and natality rates, proportion of immigrants and their distribution in the urban territory, etc.);
• (3) an analysis of the housing market, with special attention to critical situations such as overcrowding, difficult affordability, evictions, homelessness;
• (4) an analysis of migration trends, of migrants’ flows into the city, of the composition of migrant population, its features, changes and possible risks of exclusion and segregation.

Social Welfare in Brescia 1384 KB

The post Brescia City Report on the Development of Social Welfare appeared first on Wilco Project.