JPI Climate: Collective urban governance, innovation and creativity in the face of climate change (SELFCITY)

The SELFCITY project will explore the processes of self-organisation that underpin community-led project-based responses (in terms of both adaptation and mitigation) to climate change in three countries across Europe. Self-organising (i.e. the ways in which communities organise themselves) is one of the three inter-linked processes (along with market-led and state-led mechanisms) that underpin any pragmatic and innovative transition to an adapted urban environment that is closer to being carbon neutral and that may be more resilient to the challenges resulting from changing (climate-induced) weather patterns. In the past considerable work has been carried out on the role of market-led and state-led initiatives, however, we understand far less about the ways in which civil society constructs what are sometimes alternative and sometimes complementary ways of addressing climate change.
Building on existing research and practice on adapting the built environment, urban neighbourhoods and facilitating energy transition, the project will combine social researcher-led work with participant action research to explore, record and enhance the ways community activists are organizing innovative, creative and pragmatic climate change responses in their communities (of place and of space).
It will set out how the problem(s) of climate change are understood both by these activists/practitioners and by the community members they work with. The project will create space for activists to identify capacity-building needs and for the research team to work with activists to fill these needs. Through these interactive and reflective activities the academic and practitioners teams will tease out the tensions and potentials of the inter-relation of everyday knowledge and technical knowledge on climate challenge responses. Not only does this project analyse the tensions in these forms of knowledge creation within a given national context, but it also uses cross-national comparison to help participants break out of culturally implicit (and fixed) constructions of both the climate change problem and the opportunities for change.

One of the central aims of the project is also to actively engage in and facilitate, in an inter-active manner, the development of self-organisation in relation to specific, locally constructed, challenges of climate change. Here the aim of this project is to help build processes for supporting collective action to do more and disseminate the results more widely. It will do this firstly by analysing and reflecting on the increasing options for local people to become self-organised and interact with emerging technologies for adaptation as well as how, in local contexts, more 'low-tech' strategies may be developed and articulated with 'high-tech' approaches. Thereby producing useful examples of the different ways in which local adaptation and mitigation can be developed, encouraging cross-case interaction and identification of good practices and help enhance local capacity to act. The project will thus give space to practitioners of self-organisation to reflect on their practice and to make those lessons more widely available locally, nationally and Europe-wide. The key lessons derived from this work will to be made available via the change agent organisations but also made available to European and national policy makers.
By these means the project will also contribute to supporting the aims of Europe 2020 and its key goals of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. It will also compliment the increasingly important notion of social innovation as contained in the EUs Social Innovation Research in the European Union (2013) and the key ideas that: social innovation be focussed on the institutional (meso) and the individual (micro) level rather than the societal level; cross-case exchanges to add value to the work; and that stakeholders be included as co-producers of new knowledge and practices. In the UK case it will contribute to Climate Change Policy by helping to demonstrate the role that local communities can play in developing activities at local level and achieving different forms of adaptation/mitigation relevant to the needs of local people. Moreover, the focus on self-organisation is very much in the spirit of 'localism' that pervades much of the current government's thinking about how society should be organised and the increased role for local action and decision-making implicit in such an approach. Given this we will interact with organisations such as the RTPI and LGA.
It is also important to bear in mind that the case studies on self-organisation apply participatory approaches. The objective of participatory research is to modify the asymmetric relation between researchers and researched, in which the researched is often reduced to being a "research object" or "data carrier". Participatory approaches recognise local people as experts on local life and society who can provide advice to less informed outsiders. At the same time, because the "outsider" is not involved directly in local affairs, and thus not a potential competitor over resources etc., it is expected that the researcher can provide the local people with additional information on her understanding of local life and conditions, which often differ from the local interpretations. Participatory research focuses on these different views and understandings in the sense that through communication among persons mutually recognizing each other, a learning process takes place on both sides.