15mC Topic 3: Nurture neighbourhood economies – activate innovation in local everyday offers

A functioning mix of commerce, services and production plays a central role in everyday urban life. It enables residents to meet daily needs locally, provides employment opportunities, fosters social interaction and contributes to vitality and resilience in neighbourhoods. Across cities of different sizes and contexts, rising e-commerce and competition from out-of-town shopping centres have weakened traditional district structures. This resulted in high vacancies and increasingly fragile and unbalanced local offers, which in turn drive greater everyday mobility and reduce access to nearby services. Yet being able to satisfy daily needs locally is a key determinant of quality of life and building local resilience, and a cornerstone for 15-minute City concepts. 

This topic focuses on neighbourhood economies, understood as systems of diverse local commerce and social exchange, embedded in community relationships. Such systems generate shared wealth by circulating value locally, reducing travel distances and strengthening trust, identity and resilience – while acknowledging its embeddedness in bigger city-regional systems. Accordingly, the topic invites research and innovation on how to rethink and revitalise neighbourhood economies as multifunctional, pedestrian-friendly centres that integrate commerce, services, workplaces and small-scale production, while also considering key dimensions of urban mobility transitions. All proposals should foresee active engagement of critical local stakeholders needed to fulfil selected themes and laid out objectives. 

This topic encourages projects to exploredifferent pathways that strengthen, stabilise and / or rebuild neighbourhood economies by enhancing local opportunities, essential services and community wealth. Proposals should address challenges such as gaps in local provision (e.g. food or service “deserts”) and analyse how neighbourhood economies evolve over time in response to societal, economic, and demographic change. A systemic, multi-level perspective is expected, examining neighbourhood economies from the local to the metropolitan (and where relevant, national) scale. 

Proposals should conceptualise neighbourhood economies as interconnected systems shaped by business models, legal and regulatory frameworks, financial (dis)incentives, governance arrangements, (public) procurement practices, as well as alliances among public, private and community stakeholders. Understanding how these factors influence the availability, diversity and resilience of local goods and services across different urban and geographical contexts is central to developing effective responses.

Building further on these aspects, proposals should identify key levers for intervention in situations of undersupply or unbalanced local offers and co-create locally embedded solutions. Potential pathways include the role of anchor institutions in bundling local needs – such as commerce, services and spaces for social interaction – and in supporting collective and community-based initiatives that strengthen social ties. This may also involve initiatives to (re)introduce small-scale production and manufacturing into neighbourhoods, as well as to (re)connect work and everyday life through hybrid models, such as co-working spaces, workshops, repair cafés or makerspaces. 

Proposed approaches should build on existing local assets and resources, including people, skills, services, alliances and built environment, and explore how these can be mobilised to generate durable local opportunities. Key implementation challenges include mediating between property owners and local users, establishing public-private-community partnerships to close gaps in local supply, scaling effective collaborations and fostering community wealth building. Disadvantaged neighbourhoods but also suburban areas may serve as living laboratories for testing and refining such models beyond inner-city districts. Proposals are encouraged to build on deep understanding of good practices across different urban contexts to develop actionable strategies and ensure endurance beyond short-term experimentation. 

This topic further invites engagement with concepts such as foundational economy, community prosperity and neighbourhood economies, particularly in relation to care, everyday services and local infrastructures that support reproduction of society and enhance a balanced mix of urban functions within built environments. 

Finally, proposals are encouraged to investigate how spatial and mobility-related policies, such as land-use planning, ground-floor management, pedestrianisation, short-distance mobility and new work arrangements, interact with local economic dynamics.

Project proposals submitted under this topic should address one or several of the following questions: 

• Which structural, regulatory, financial and governance factors most strongly influence the availability, diversity and resilience of local offers of goods and services, and how do they differ across contexts?
• Which levers for intervention are most effective in addressing gaps, undersupply and imbalances in neighbourhood offers and infrastructures, particularly in disadvantaged or vulnerable areas?
• Which collaborative models between public, private, and community-based stakeholders may enable and stabilise effective initiatives to increase local offers and infrastructures?
• How can anchor institutions, community-based initiatives and hybrid business models strengthen local supply, social ties and community wealth? What is needed to synthesise, translate and scale related existing practices to other contexts?
• Under what conditions can small-scale production, manufacturing and hybrid business models (e.g. co-working spaces, repair cafés, makerspaces) be successfully (re)embedded in neighbourhood economies?
• How do spatial planning and mobility policies interact with neighbourhood economies, and to what extent can they be applied to avoid daily trips or shift to sustainable mobility options, while enhancing local economic vitality?
• How can digital services (such as apps, chat groups, formal and informal neighbourhood platforms) be applied to strengthen neighbourhood economies and local social resilience?

Rather than focusing on isolated technical solutions, projects are expected to address this topic in a systemic way. Project outputs should be impact-oriented and process-oriented, and therefore as concrete and user-centred as possible. Expected outputs include, but are not limited to: 

• Evidence and analytical frameworks to understanding dynamics in neighbourhood economies from a systemic perspective.
• Insights on intervention pathways and co-created, locally embedded solutions, building on effective levers to address gaps and imbalances in local provision.
• “Policy packaging” to strengthen neighbourhood economies that guide interventions in cities of different size and context.
• Governance and collaboration models between public, private and community-based stakeholders that support local supply and community wealth building.
• Strategies for scaling and perspectives to increase durability beyond pilots, building on synergies with existing local initiatives.
• Evidence-based recommendations on interactions of planning and mobility policies and results on neighbourhood economies, reduced travel demand and sustainable mobility.

Greater readiness for replication and policy uptake of neighbourhood economy approaches.