Co-city is the winner of the first Urban Innovation Action Call of the EU.

Co-city is intended to break the self-reinforcing circle of poverty, social segregation in deprived neighbourhoods and lack of participation. It achieves this by supporting the development of an innovative, polycentric “commons-based urban welfare” composed of generative communities centred on urban commons, low-cost service co-production, social mixing, and care of public spaces.

The Municipality of Torino opened a public call for citizens to collect proposals related to the co-management of urban commons with local administrations. The authoritative approach is replaced by a collaborative one that considers citizens as potential changemakers, agents of virtuous circular processes of commoners’ welfare. Meanwhile, the public sector evolves from being a service provider to being an enabler and a partner.

47 proposals have been submitted to realise different kinds of intervention such as regeneration of buildings in abandon or the care of public spaces.

Within Co-city, the University of Turin is responsible with different departments for the Co-City Toolkit, a guideline for legal and technological tools implemented in the pilot use-case.

FirstLife was used to map urban commons co-managed by citizens and administrators, but also as a tool to coordinate, collect and share all projects.

The blockchain technology has been experimented with financial tools to support the local economy of urban commons: exchange of tokens as prepaid cards, coupons, fidelity cards, buying groups, fundraising initiatives.