One Page Summary

We are proposing an innovative planning tool which we call the urban commons guidance (UCG). The UCG addresses the high fragmentation of urban land in Câmpușor area in Sibiu among a large number of owners, which leads to a disincentive of owners of investment and maintenance. In return this leads to neglected plots and risks for public health and safety.

The UCG creates a negotiation matrix, with instruments and know-how that allow the cooperation and negotiation between among multiple stakeholders.

We envision in the UCG an innovative process of stakeholder engagement and several scenarios for its transfer and further implementation beyond the 6 months. The UCG for Câmpușor will be drafted through 2 co-creation events and 2 months of peer-to-peer work. We also allow flexibility for its implementation, as we are building capacity for more leadership for the local authority in addressing the challenge, as well as more capacity for land owners to work on a common plan and other interest groups to advocate for the mechanism embodied by the UCG. When we developed the UCG, we strongly capitalized in our expertise in working in transitional cities, where one of the biggest risks is the disempowerment of all actors involved and the incapacity to act for addressing urban conundrums. There are no direct competitors, the issue is that most organizations have a reactive work mode, and not a proactive one as the one we are proposing.

As this is a place-based challenge the main stakeholders are the Sibiu municipality and the land owners. The UCG allows both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. We will explore both these scenarios with the stakeholders, and depending on their engagement in the process, we will collectively decide on the solution which may have the best concrete results for tackling the issue and serving the larger Sibiu community. Through Heritas and our own contacts we will engage with the municipality. For the land owners, with the support of the municipality we will cross-reference the cadastral number of the plot and the name of the owner with information collected by the population census department, in order to be able to contact them. We will also issue a local announcement in the local radio for land owners in Câmpușor to contact us at a dedicated phone number. For other interest groups we will use the help of Heritas and also with the Sibiu Community Foundation, with which we worked before.

While internationally there is consistent work around urban commons, which signals different initiatives around public goods, results are still at odds. Bologna has currently drafted a regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons, which tries to engage more stakeholders in the process of preserving public space. Our initiative goes beyond this, by engaging land owners in creating public space from their private one, in the interest of their own safety and possibly even a more efficient reconfiguration. Heritas has implemented several guidelines for owners for preserving building facades and urban image, parts of urban commons. Our proposal takes this further by creating also a guidance for urban authority on how to conditionalize zonal urban plans to a reconfiguration agreed by all owners. Our research and expertise has revealed there is a legislative prerogative allowing this kind of conditioning by an urban authority, which until now has never been used.