Case Studies  The Berlin Case Study: The Socially Integrative City.Wrangelkiez, Boxhagener Platz, Ostkreuz

3. Summary: Cooperation and Coordination in Neighbourhood Development in Berlin

In our case study, we presented different forms of partnership. They could only evolve under the common roof of social urban development and on the basis of the different funding programmes. All funding schemes allow in their regulations for a certain local flexibility in implementing the partnerships. The Berlin approach is also characterised by several levels of administration (due to its status as a city state): at and between all those levels, new forms of cooperation emerged to coordinate the implementation across the administrative departments involved. Generally, the structure of the partners’ teamwork consists of cooperation in joint projects and coordination in the form of contracts and formal agreements.

The initiated processes should be sustainable beyond the funding period. This is implied in the philosophy of empowerment and capacity building and should be achieved by new partnerships. Up to today this happens mostly in the form of new associations and societies.

The (so far) experimental and unusual character (institutionalised by an administrative agreement) of the partnerships is ambivalent. On the one hand it ensures great attention and incentives for participation, on the other hand this exceptionality creates pressure for success, which can hinder necessary longer phases of consideration. Last, the fact that the funding can be stopped on a mid-term basis leads to a feeling of uncertainty and makes projects more appealing which are rather quick to realise.

We would like to resume all these considerations once more with focus on the central ENTRUST-questions: How have local partnerships been initiated and how can they be organised successfully?

In all the partnerships we presented, the public authorities or their contracted agencies played a leading role, at least during the stage of development. It is THEIR task to stimulate local development, usually this happens in the form of projects. Projects offer the opportunity for a precise formulation of aims and objectives and clear agreements. This way, the effort to be put in a project is foreseeable and the entry level relatively low. Several examples showed that this is a suitable procedure for mobilising actors from the neighbourhood. Currently though, the realisation of projects is still difficult due to complicated application procedures. The governance of the projects and their integration into an overall strategy for the  neighbourhood ask for fundamentally different forms of participation and is so far dominated by administrative actors. URBAN II gave a good example of these structural coordination problems. The neighbourhood fund model presents a successful and surely expandable experiment for an additional inhabitant-based steering instrument.

2.5 The Neighbourhood Fund     From here on Further: Recommendations for the Future