Abstract
Grassroots initiatives, initiated and managed by local communities, have been spreading in cities all around Europe, addressing the citizens’ needs and the daily challenge of finding sustainable solutions for urban environments about food, waste, transport or energy. In recent years, these communities are increasingly making use of new technologies and some of them are currently shaped around Internet platforms, which became critical to their existence. This paper address them as grassroots online initiatives, aiming to outline their specificities and to discuss the methodology to research their impacts, with a specific attention towards the environmental dimension of their contribution to the society. The analysis is descriptive in nature and it has the main goal of integrating the emerging literature on this topic and of paving the way for further research activities in the field. To reach this objective, it presents a review of how new communication technologies have allowed the development of different kinds of community based initiatives, how these initiatives can be assessed and if they present significant differences with respect to the more traditional, face to face ones, focusing on a selection of case studies around Europe. An in-depth analysis of two initiatives, dealing respectively with sustainable mobility and sustainable food production, allows presenting some main findings.
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Notes
- 1.
Seventh Framework Programme, Grant Agreement No. 603705 (Project TESS).
- 2.
From TESS Description of Work.
- 3.
This paper is based on the results presented in TESS D4.2, “Multi-criteria analysis for carbon efficient projects”: http://www.tess-transition.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/TESS_D4.2_Multi-criteria-analysis-for-carbon-efficient-projects.pdf.
- 4.
From TESS Description of Work.
- 5.
The original TESS data sheet for the multi-criteria analysis was elaborated by Filippo Celata, Venere Stefania Sanna and Cary Yungmee Hendrickson (Sapienza University of Rome).
- 6.
D2.2: “Assessment data sheets for community-based initiatives”, http://www.tess-transition.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/TESS-Deliverable_2.2_FINAL.pdf.
- 7.
D3.1: data collection database for success factors and constraints”: http://www.tess-transition.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-07-01_TESS-Deliverable_3.1_FINAL.pdf.
- 8.
- 9.
The TESS Track-It tool methodology has been developed considering country-specific dataset to calculate the CO2 reduction, according to the local context: http://www.sustainable-communities.eu/track-it/.
- 10.
Given the ECC multi-country nature, the country selected to calculate the reduction was the one who performed the highest score during the 2016 challenge, which is Poland.
- 11.
D2.4 “Carbon reduction and community impact Scoreboard”( http://www.tess-transition.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2016_06_20_Deliverable_2.4_FINAL.pdf).
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Prampolini, A., Passani, A. (2017). Community Based Initiatives and New Communication Technologies: A Preliminary Analysis Towards an Overall Assessment. In: Kompatsiaris, I., et al. Internet Science. INSCI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10673. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70284-1_4
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