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ABCitiEs: Area Based Collaborative Entrepreneurship in Cities is a european project fostering urban regeneration at the level of local businesses. Promoting inclusive growth, cooperation and cohesion, the project aims to address the negative impacts of globalization such as economic restructuring, income inequality and the decline of urban areas.
Project Summary
Across European cities local entrepreneurs are joining forces in new ways, forming collectives to stimulate business growth and innovation and to create a more attractive business environment. Area Based Collaborative Entrepreneurship (ABCE) means entrepreneurs collaborate by co-investing in facilities or technology, market their urban district collectively, improve shared public space, etc. The value of such collectives is increasingly recognized by local governments and policy measures to stimulate these initiatives are being developed.
Area based collaborative entrepreneurship fosters urban regeneration as the participating firms are most often strongly connected to their neighbourhood and committed to social goals. Neighbourhood liveability and social ties between local stakeholders are enforced. ABCE supports inclusive growth, cooperation and cohesion and helps to address the negative impacts of globalization such as economic restructuring, income inequality and the decline of urban areas.
The current policy instruments of the project partners seek to promote knowledge-based SME innovation and access to funding but they show a lack of attention to the emerging networked and locally anchored types of initiatives that promote inclusive growth, innovation and regeneration. For this reason they intend to develop recommendations for four OPs and one other policy instrument in European regions by capturing local learnings systematically, identifying critical success conditions and sharing them across regions in Europe.
Five European urban regions are involved in this project: Amsterdam, Athens, Manchester, Vilnius, and the conurbation Varazdin-Cakovic (Croatia). All regions currently experiment with ABCE and initiated this project to share experiences and gain deeper insights in order to develop more effective policy instruments.
- Visit the project’s official website.