SURPRISE
Sustainability on Urban Renewal Programs

In Southern Europe The “Surprise” sub-project addresses the question of achieving adequate and effective processes’ design for urban regeneration policies (URPs), through the comparison of best practices in order to develop methodologies for an integrated approach on urban regeneration programmes, using methods concerning the three dimensions of sustainability (social, economical and environmental). Involved Partners have promoted and implemented in deprived neighbourhoods, in the last ten years, a set of innovative URPs and they have acquired sound experience in designing advanced policy design. Project’s need to be addressed are in finding new ways to improve policy design of URPS in deprived neighbourhoods.
Subject of the project is in sharing, transferring and comparing field-experiences in URPs in order to produce methodological guidelines useful in helping policy makers, professionals, institutions and stakeholders in designing more adequate and suitable planning instruments for neighbourhood presenting clear signs of social, environmental, cultural and economic segregation.

Achieving the above described overall objective was connected to the achievement of these sub-objectives:

• to focus, in selected program-champion/case studies, the aspects more characterizing under the three profiles (environmental, social, economic) and to estimate the possible synergies;
• to estimate the interactions between programs started on contiguous territorial ambits, in order to evidence their strategic valence as a sequence of actions oriented to sets of urban policies;
• elaboration of a three categories analytic framework (social, economic and environmental data) in order to analyze the pilot experiences/best practices of the involved areas;
• to elaborate procedures for delivering innovative and integrated strategic approaches;
• to focus the attention on methodologies working on recreation of relational networks inside neighbourhoods: how to empower local communities from the social, economical, cultural and environmental point of view.

SURPRISE has involved the following partners

City of Roma (Lead partner)
City of Torino
City of Madrid
City of Thessaloniki
City of Messina
City of Catania

Meetings

Kick off meeting: 27th/28th November 2006, Torino
Presentation of the partners and their cases
First discussions on how to work together
Preparation of the first report

Second meeting: 22nd/23rd April 2007, Madrid
Discussions on the state of art and indicators, preparation of guidelines
Preparation of the second report

Final meeting and public conference: 4th/5th October 2007, Roma
Internal discussion on outputs (guidelines) and on how to close the project
Public presentation and discussion on the project’s outputs and results

Projects outputs

Outputs are directly related to different project steps. Thus, detailed inquiries of the cities’ case studies can be considered as first outputs. With the help of these inquiry charts and first discussions on dimensions of sustainability a first report was produced. The following discussion on methodological approaches in each city and general ideas on the instrument of methodological guidelines then led to a second paper called “Towards common guidelines”. In the end of the project there was produced a final paper on guidelines for sustainability in urban renewal programs considering four main aspects: institutional processes, policies and actions for sustainability, evaluation and URPs and the EU cohesion policy 2007 – 2013. A part from the outputs on the whole project’s level each partner is going to achieve some specific outputs such as evaluation of implemented projects, validation of methods for projects in implementation phase, or adjustment of projects in initial phase according to SURPRISE results.

Another important output of the project is a website that collect all the project’s deliverables: http://www.surprise-esdp.eu
In parallel the project also focused on transparency of the work creating a website which provides information on the project, the single case studies and involved partners. Further outputs were seen in the eventual creation of follow-up projects and the establishment of stable cooperation between the partners.

Download the final report >>

http://www.surprise-esdp.eu/