Urban Transformation and Bioregional Resilience: The Micro-Macro Deal

European cities have a key role in defining the continent's future. The interplay between disruptive geopolitical shifts, socio-economic needs, and ecological constraints create a new landscape for them – especially as dense urban settlements are experiencing extreme floods and periods of drought. At the same time, the increasing urgency of climate adaptation at the nexus of food, biodiversity, water and energy is confronted with decreasing municipal budgets and capacity.

During EFA24, the 10x100 Lab initiated a transformative model focused on city-bioregions, proposing an actionable blueprint for the implementation of tiny living labs that foster resilience and adaptation (see examples in attached documentation). These micro inventions are designed to be flexible and connected to growing systems, allowing for incremental transformation that can respond agilely to socio-technical and socio-ecological changes:

Tiny Living Labs offer research setups that public institutions can explore within their discretionary power. Designed as a portfolio of micro interventions, they become a learning network of prototypes, addressing localised challenges across different legislative levels and spatial scales (e.g. neighbourhood or river system). This “hidden system” enables the development and testing of innovative concepts with community engagement, providing visible and tangible improvements that can foster public support and demonstrate the potential of larger-scale implementations.

Growing Systems provide a foundational landscape for these microarchitectures, where modularity and scalability allow for an evolutionary approach. This is crucial in areas such as urban agriculture or water management, where the capacity to expand and adapt to the specific needs of a bioregion is intertwined with the industrial transformation and resilience of ecological infrastructures. The setup of a growing system facilitates the gradual implementation of adaptation measures, starting small and spreading out in concentric circles across the entire portfolio.

This dual approach not only bridges the micro-macro divide but also ensures that local innovations are nested within broader regional strategies, and thereby regularly informing the adaptation of financial and regulatory conditions:

• Diversifying financial strategies that encapsulate the essence of sustainable growth and communal well-being: initiatives range from small-scale community gardens that enhance local biodiversity to large-scale transformations of urban spaces into sustainable ecosystems. These projects require a financial framework that is both dynamic and inclusive, supporting initiatives at every scale.

• Testing governance models that can adapt to rapidly changing environmental and social conditions: Commons Public Partnerships (CPPs) are governance structures that extend beyond traditional Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) by incorporating a broader spectrum of civil society and other-than-human actors into the decision-making process for more robust outcomes.

This baseline for a “Micro-Macro Deal” is powered by coordinated collaboration inviting political leaders, public administrators, and civil society to co-create the conditions for more stakeholders to democratise transformation processes and forge strong, resilient alliances across all sectors and industries.

By contextualising the 10x100 approach in places like the city of Mannheim with the Metropolregion Rhein-Neckar and the city of Linz with Upper Austria, we aim to show how European cities and their regions can contribute to growing systems that align with planetary and societal well-being.