The concept of urban regeneration includes efforts to reverse declining physical structures and economies in cities by identifying needs and challenges, engaging all stakeholders and delivering tailored projects for sustainable new communities. The EU-funded T-Factor project questions the waiting time in urban regeneration (the time between an intervention request and its implementation) to prove how culture, creative collaboration, and stakeholder engagement can cause inclusive urban (re)generation, social innovation, and business in urban centres. The project considers early-stage regenerations in the historical centres of select cities and provides their public-private partnerships with a special ecosystem of capacity building for extensively new city-making projects. These cities are Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Bilbao (Spain), the Aleksotas area of Kaunas (Lithuania), the Lisbon metropolitan area and Almada (Portugal), London (the UK), and Milan (Italy).

By leveraging local coalitions of actors, the project will use the masterplans of the targeted regenerations as the starting point to steer collective inquiry into their meanings and narratives, co-create visions of future spaces, and put them on stage via meanwhile uses and experiences. Throughout the process, culture and creativity will support voice and engagement, and help enrich and steer the masterplans towards heritage and culture-relevant innovation and enterprise, and social and cultural integration. Via trans-disciplinary action research, the project will keep track of change, and build on the insights to add iteratively new layers of collective reflection and action. This learning-by-making will continuously inform masterplans and PPPs, consolidating, adjusting, and providing new directions of urban development rooted in shared goals of sustainable city-making.

T-Factor will work as an international community of practice, delivering an innovative city-mentoring model, which will create multiple collaborations between the pilot cities, advance cultural and creative hubs, universities, enterprises, and social organisations partnered to the project. Through this community, T-Factor will shape an international movement of capacity-building and knowledge co-creation for the transformative time in urban regeneration leveraging heritage, culture, and creativity.

The T-Factor project aims at building a full portfolio of tested innovations in relation to ‘meanwhile spaces’. ‘Meanwhile spaces’ are vacant buildings, plots, and unused spaces that are more frequently used as temporary sites for co-creative experimentation and are well positioned to become permanent fixtures of the local landscape, acting as prototypes. The portfolio of such innovations will embrace the design, organisation, management, governance, funding, and regulatory aspects of temporary uses. The project works across both early stage and advanced regeneration initiatives in Europe and beyond. The project's pilots will be supported by addressing specific innovation missions through temporary uses. Spanning themes such as culture and creativity, green and nature-based solutions, circularity, social innovation, and climate change, amongst others. Specifically, in relation to circular and collaborative economy, the aim is to raise awareness about the environmental and technological challenges in achieving a sustainable and inclusive society, particularly through the lens of circular material flows and collaborative economies at the neighbourhood level. The demos and their results can be relevant to cities/regions/territories with the same or similar issues and objectives, which seek to develop and implement circular systemic solutions involving or related to ‘meanwhile spaces’.

Programme(s):

• H2020-EU.3.5.: SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Climate action, Environment, Resource Efficiency and Raw Materials (Main programme)
• H2020-EU.3.5.6.: Cultural heritage

Topic(s):

• SC5-20-2019: Transforming historic urban areas and/or cultural landscapes into hubs of entrepreneurship and social and cultural integration

€ 8 605 612.50 (EU contribution: € 7 998 425)

Anci Toscana Associazione

Contact the project: https://www.t-factor.eu/

• Lama Development And Cooperation Agency Societa Cooperativa
• Plusvalue
• The University Of The Arts London
• Politecnico Di Milano
• Asociacion Cultural Open Yourkolektiboa
• Land Italia SRL
• Fundacion Tecnalia Research & Innovation
• Aalborg Universitet
• Arniani Marta
• Friche La Belle De Mai
• Stichting Waag Society
• Kauno Technologijos Universitetas
• Universidade Nova De Lisboa
• Fundacio Per A La Universitat Oberta De Catalunya
• Entidad Publica Empresarial Local Bilbao Ekintza
• Kauno Miesto Savivaldybes Administracija
• Technische Universitat Dortmund
• Stadt Dortmund
• I-Propeller Nv
• Lodz-Miasto Na Prawach Powiatu
• London Borough Of Camden
• Kaunas 2022
• Universita Degli Studi Di Milano