Institutional Collective Actions for Culture and Heritage-Led Urban Regeneration: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Institutional collective actions (ICAs) provide a fascinating framework for comprehending collaborative urban initiatives. We defined ICAs as groups of people and organizations working together to promote a shared goal they could not pursue on their own. This study provides an empirical justification of why particular characteristics support the success of ICAs and why others fail. We restrict our analysis to culture-and-heritage-led urban regeneration initiatives and analyze the combinations of conditions under which these initiatives achieve their objectives. Adopting an integrated strategy, we studied prerequisites and critical elements that affect the success of collaborative actions, such as entrepreneurship, the enabling role of institutional capacity, multi-stakeholder involvement, and co-governance. Therefore, we compared sixteen culture-and-heritage-led urban regeneration initiatives in Europe as examples of ICAs in the urban context. We utilized fsQCA, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, as a method that enabled us to define the configurations (combinations of factors) that determine the performances of urban regeneration actions. The results demonstrate that a variety of elements are necessary for developing collaborative initiatives and that three different recipes can be developed. In addition, this study contributes to the body of knowledge on institutional collective actions in two ways: (1) by providing empirical evidence of why specific conditions need to be considered when developing collective actions and (2) by showing how specific conditions interact and explain the performance of ICAs.

1. Introduction

The relationship between the public and other institutions is dramatically evolving, bringing attention to an ecosystemic way to coordinate public initiatives [1]. Public services are one of the new delivery models that challenge established patterns, seeking new interactions between governments, communities, private, social and civic actors [2]. A renewed emphasis on collaborative arrangements in urban government has recently emerged in academic literature [3,4]. The collective view of public services defines new strategies for local players to reclaim the public space and self-govern urban resources [5,6]. Institutional collective actions (ICAs) provide a fascinating framework for understanding collaborative urban initiatives [7].

This paper analyzes co-produced culture-and-heritage-led urban regeneration initiatives from the perspective of institutional collective actions. In ICAs, groups of people and organizations work together to promote a shared goal they could not pursue individually. They create and absorb indivisible interdependences that maintain the availability and use of a public resource [8]. Research on ICAs has focused on the scope of the collaborative initiatives [4,9], the likelihood of the actions [7,10], and their limitations [11]. Embracing an integrated approach [12], we can identify more conditions and key factors that determine the success of collective actions, such as their relation to the market and entrepreneurial opportunities [13,14,15,16], their institutional-capacity-enabling role [17], and, even more importantly, the ability to define multistakeholder involvement and co-governance arrangements [18,19]. In culture-and-heritage-led urban regeneration initiatives, the golden standard for the institutional design of co-governance arrangements is the Council of Europe Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Faro Convention). Indeed, Article 1 of the Faro Convention recognizes the right to participate, while Section III and, more specifically, Article 11 establishes a shared responsibility when it comes to managing tangible as well as intangible cultural heritage [20,21]. This study contributes to the existing body of literature by providing empirical justification of why particular characteristics support the success of ICAs and how combinations of these factors explain the success of the collaboration. In doing so, this research provides a more multifaceted viewpoint on how particular elements might affect the results of collective actions.

To deepen our knowledge of how different factors interact in determining the success of collaborations, we reinforced the bridge between the institutional collective actions and ecosystems perspectives [22]. The paper also contributes to deepening our knowledge of the ICA framework and providing a context for addressing society’s major challenges [23,24]. Therefore, we compared sixteen urban regeneration initiatives in Europe as examples of ICAs in the urban context. Hence, these initiatives aim to foster collaboration between different institutional actors, such as citizens, civic groups, government bodies, and private actions, and to achieve public benefits due to the regeneration of abandoned spaces and their reuse for community purposes. This research thus provides a more nuanced viewpoint on the influence of institutional elements and conditions on collaborative initiatives and how they influence the results of such initiatives. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQC) [25], we determine the requirements and circumstances under which urban regeneration initiatives achieve their objectives. This paper intends to answer the following research questions: What kind of culture-and-heritage-led urban regeneration activities, such as institutional collective actions (ICAs), are successful? What conditions explain the achievement of these results?

This study aims to contribute to the broader body of knowledge on institutional collective actions in two ways: (1) by providing empirical evidence of why specific conditions need to be considered when developing community-based actions and (2) by showing how specific conditions interact and explain the performance of ICAs. First, we want to understand why some collaborative actions succeed and others fail. Therefore, the following section details ICAs and their role in society. Second, we outline the critical elements of ICAs with an ecosystems approach and operationalize them into conditions for QCA. In addition, we investigate the combinations of factors that potentially explain the performance of ICAs and the minimum set of characteristics necessary to achieve their objectives. In the next section, we go into further detail about the methodology and the analysis, explaining why in the culture-and-cultural-heritage field urban regeneration initiatives are relevant to understanding ICAs. Finally, the findings of our investigation and how these results affect how we perceive ICAs are presented. We close our analysis by acknowledging the study’s shortcomings and offering some ideas about future research possibilities.

2. Literature Review

This paragraph will answer the question: what are the conditions enabling institutional collective action in participatory governance cases? Institutional collective actions provide shared benefits that are difficult or impossible to withhold from others [26]. As a result, they frequently concern non-excludable and non-rivalrous public goods [27]. In other words, in ICAs, people or organizations collaborate to accomplish shared goals that it would be impossible for them to achieve on their own [28]. However, despite having similar goals, people occasionally decide not to take collective actions [29], as rational economic agents are not encouraged to participate in such collective acts [30]. Therefore, institutional collective actions require two essential components: collective initiative and a single entity group [31]. Hence, it is crucial to focus on how collaborations might lead to a framework that guides people toward a common objective [32,33,34,35]. It has typically been claimed that either the institutional setting [36,37,38,39] or the social context [26,40,41,42] motivate people to be part of ICAs. Therefore, governmental entities, citizens, and civic players are all part of this process, leading to ICAs that depend on the institutional environment [43]. Hence, ICAs aim to develop the framework to attain more considerable joint advantages [36]. To fully understand how ICAs work, it is necessary to study this type of collaboration’s economic, social, and political ties and how the actions are embedded in the institutional environment [44,45,46,47]. Thus, embeddedness offers foundations for understanding the relationships between the actors and their environment [47,48]. In addition, to the institutional environment, in ICAs, formal organizations have a central role [49,50]. Organizations drive the identification of members; they provide governance models and rules for the decision-making processes of ICAs [50]. Therefore, we identify four critical conditions described in the literature as key to the success of ICAs.

Enabling institutional capacity. The formation of collective actions has the same fundamental theoretical and practical implications as the institutional capacity to promote collaboration [51,52,53]. Hence, institutional capacity can serve as the foundation for collective production, exchange, and distribution of shared value, responding to the legal systems of the economic and social environments [54]. One of the main components of institutional capacity is the ability of institutions to design and shape people’s interactions by relying on formal and informal rules [55]. Informal institutions include traditions, customs, moral values, religious beliefs, and all other long-standing behavioral norms [56]. Therefore, it is necessary to comprehend the norms that regulate the institutional environment to understand collective actions. The limitation of collective actions might come from social norms among inhabitants, conventions, and the capacity of communities to control and implement spontaneously shared patterns and higher-scale regulations [57]. As an example of informal institutions, we can mention the initiatives that shape policy and a virtuous cycle of economic empowerment [58], such as “policy networks” [59,60], “issue networks” [61], and “policy communities” [62]. In addition, the boundaries of collective actions might be settled by formal institutions, such as constitutions, regulations, contracts, and other forms of governmental or legal arrangements [63,64,65], which are typically established and managed by a variety of agency measures [64]. The enabling nature of institutions’ interventions is rooted in the capability of expressing a policy entrepreneurship approach, shaping the institutional settings based on the peculiarities and needs of the territory and acting as enablers of collaborative actions [36,54,66]. Therefore, formal institutions that embrace this enabling spirit are pivotal players in networking multiple efforts through collective actions [54]. Therefore, in cities, institutions are built as providers of rules that, if they embrace cooperative principles, can support the design and implementation of civic collaboration processes. Thus, public institutions can become platforms, enablers, monitors, and valuers of such change [67,68]. The enabling public institutional capacity is thus measured by the ability of institutions to mobilize, innovate, revitalize, balance, and coordinate to promote a coherent vision of local players that can be sustained over time [69].

Multi-actor participation. Collective actions emphasize the importance of cultivating collaboration among stakeholders at different levels of public actions, broadening multi-actor participation beyond traditional power elites [70]. This attitude entails recognizing various types of local knowledge and developing social networks as a source of collaboration through which new initiatives can be launched legitimately [71,72]. In developing collaborative initiatives, multi-actor experiments are gaining attention, and their crucial role is being recognized [73,74]. Hence, multi-actor initiatives become a means of collectively addressing complex issues by mobilizing and integrating perspectives, efforts, and resources from various typologies of stakeholders [73,75,76]. Participation can take various forms depending on the types of actors involved and the different scales [77]. Regarding the types of actors, the literature and tested practices emphasize incremental approaches evolving over time. These range from double to triple, quadruple, and quintuple helix relations. Double interactions involve public–private actor pairs; triple relations are those established between universities, industries, and governments [78]; quadruple models aim to go beyond the triple helix in order to strengthen the role of the commons and social innovators [79]. Lastly, the quintuple helix model proposes an updated framework that considers the involvement of five actors, providing independent consideration of both the function of organized civil society and the previously undervalued role of unorganized or informal civil society, including students and young entrepreneurs or innovators [80]. The evolution of stakeholder participation has increasingly stressed the importance of diversity within collaboration. Hence, diversifying the types of actors is an effective means for assuring the inclusion of pluralistic opinions that might otherwise be ignored in processes with fewer participating actor types [81]. For example, the fourth actor, organized civil society, can generate social innovation over time through various forms of aggregation based on cooperation, mutualism, and reciprocity. Therefore, multi-actor collaboration is a repository of know-how and tools useful for enabling and organizing collective action.

Entrepreneurship. Collaborations can foster the participation of entrepreneurs in collective actions to ensure the long-term sustainability of their activities. Thus, entrepreneurs frequently notice things others miss, spot opportunities, and create new ones [82,83,84]. Hence, entrepreneurs can bring collective resources to bear on joint problems [85] and provide motivations to individual participants whose interests may lie in not cooperating [86]. To understand the role of entrepreneurs in shaping their institutional environment, researchers have used a variety of approaches, including new cooperatives [87], the shared value model [88,89], and stakeholder perspectives [90]. From these perspectives, it emerges that an entrepreneur is not a lone player. The literature increasingly emphasizes the significance of entrepreneurship inside the community and collective actions [91,92], revealing the potential of entrepreneurs to influence society and favoring collaborative efforts. These forms of collaboration are often defined as collective entrepreneurship, where individuals voluntarily band together to produce economic value and improve everyone’s situation [93]. Collaboration with an entrepreneurial spirit [94,95] defines links and relationships that aim to cut through barriers, facilitate the exchange of ideas, promote the benefits of collaboration [96,97], and support the co-creation of goods and services [84]. Entrepreneurial activities might take various forms, including organizations, partnerships, and social businesses [98,99,100,101,102,103]. Hybrid models enable collective entrepreneurial activities to simultaneously address societal and economic challenges while positioning themselves in the global economy [104]. Collaborative entrepreneurship summarizes the possibility for entrepreneurs to define democratic and collaborative activities among similar and varied players and generate beneficial societal change [105]. In conclusion, entrepreneurs can guide collaborative effort towards the economic sustainability of the action and support changing of current institutional arrangements to new ones [98,102].

Co-governance. Governance is a fundamental component of collectively decided norms and regulations that control individual and group behavior [36]. Hence, governance is described as the means to steer the process that influences decisions and actions [106], undertaking activities to ensure the coordination and monitoring of effective institutional collective actions [107]. To ensure a comprehensive understanding, we use an extensive definition of governance called co-governance. The concept of co-governance has its origin in intergovernmental cooperation in the 1960s [108,109] and in American federalism [110]. After that, it was used to refer to any collaborative approach characterized by the participation of actors in the organization’s decision-making process or collective action [111]. Therefore, co-governance includes multifaceted aspects of collaborative governance that refer to different academic streams [73,106,112]. In this view, co-governance includes some peculiarities that have also been attributed to co-production and co-management [113,114]. Hence, stakeholders actively participate in the design and planning of services based on shared decisions and responsibilities, contributing to the production of their services [115]. Co-governance defines people’s role in the design, delivery, and administration of public services [116,117]. If we apply the co-governance approach to institutional collective actions, the highest level of co-governance is obtained when people that take advantage of and those who develop the services are equal [118]. In conclusion, co-governance arrangements give inhabitants that had previously been marginalized in day-to-day neighborhood governance the responsibility to coordinate activities and collaboration efforts [10], ensuring significant user control over services. Thanks to participation in the decision-making process, people can bring to the collective actions their expertise and knowledge, improving their capacity to address complex societal problems [111] and contribute to the achievement of public objectives [119].

Based on this literature review, we define the following expectation: collaboration involves different types of players, and it defines a form of governance that includes them in the decision-making process. However, to succeed, there must be institutional conditions that empower local communities, being either enabling institutions or entrepreneurial activities.

3. Materials and Methods

Researchers have analyzed institutional collaborative actions to understand their potential and limitations. However, how organizational characteristics and institutional circumstances interact and how this combination may explain the results of institutional collective actions is uncertain. Urban initiatives are a great illustration of ICAs, since collaborations between public, civic, and private actors are necessary to revitalize urban spaces and offer new public services. These joint actions might take different forms related to their governance and their relations with the institutional environment, leading to uncertain production of social and economic benefits. This partnership may establish a successful model, or it may occasionally diverge, being unable to restore the spaces and activate the community. As a result, institutions can play the role of facilitators. Urban regeneration calls for the public to establish a framework that enables communities to actively participate in the repurposing of a building, turning the space into a hub where people, organizations, and their surroundings can meet. The participation of several stakeholders is essential for ensuring that various interests are considered and coordinated. The players taking part in the initiative should be involved in decision-making and governance. In addition, to ensure the economic sustainability of the reuse and the shaping of the institutional environment, the initiative needs to integrate institutional entrepreneurial activities in the form of individual entrepreneurial interventions or institutional enabling involvements. Hence, urban regeneration is not only related to the building’s restoration, but is more related to the ability to spark a positive feedback loop that encourages the development of new services, opportunities, and resources for the city. Our studies show that a regenerative process could only begin in a few urban regeneration projects. In contrast, in the other cases, the regeneration plans did not serve society and managed to renovate the structure.

To perform our investigation, we focused on urban regeneration activities in which four criteria were comparable. First, all urban regeneration actions are the results of multi-stakeholder effort, meaning that several factors contributed to their development, even if to different extents. Second, each urban regeneration plan was already in an advanced stage, with an internal organization and relations to the institutional environment. Third, they are situated in European cities, ensuring the institutional conditions are analogous. Fourth, we chose regeneration activities that focused on existing buildings or area reuse, reducing the interventions’ diversity and possible uses. Hence, all cases aim to restore cultural and heritage values within the city and ensure a more inclusive and sustainable city.

The data collection was part of the Open Heritage Project’s activities and built on the consortium’s experience. The cases summarize previous knowledge related to different years of activities in studying regeneration initiatives. The project offered the chance to choose a basket of cases with comparable circumstances in terms of expectations related to community involvement in the heritage regeneration process, but distinct final results. To ensure the necessary diversity, case selection followed a broad definition of culture-and-heritage-led urban regeneration action. Additionally, the selection process aimed to take into account geographical diversity, making sure that various countries were taken into account. The cases examined offer the ideal sample for comprehending the relationship between the initial conditions and the performance of ICAs. Independently from the promoter, they all present a strong ambition for communities to have a role, which characterizes their strategic choices on multiple scales. Hence, we integrated information collected through interviews with relevant participants, sight visits, and videos. Thus, different sources contributed to the gathering of information on urban regeneration actions. Interviews with at least two key players from each urban initiative and, in each case, a sight visit were performed. The respondents were questioned between September 2018 and March 2020. In all cases, the interviews followed the same methodology. They covered the same questions about the four conditions, the history of the regeneration actions, the overall organizations, and relations to the broader context. The scores were assigned using these responses, thanks also to the collaboration of all researchers of the Open Heritage consortium. An overview of the regeneration actions is provided in

Table 1. Overview of the cases.

Case	Location	Collaboration Initiator	History of the Renovation	Former Use	What Is It Now?	State of the Art	Governance Arrangements
Cascina Roccafranca	Turin, Italy	Public institutions	After 30 years of vacancy, Cascina Roccafranca was bought by the Municipality of Turin for reuse and refunctioning with the support of the European Union Urban II program.	Farmstead	Cascina Roccafranca is a public social and cultural center. The location hosts several facilities, services, a museum, events, and courses.	The project is running as the renovation is fully developed	The space and actions are led by a foundation with public civic governance, which includes representatives from the municipality and from the community. They jointly lead the activities
Scugnizzo Liberato	Naples, Italy	Local community	In 2015, a local grass-roots group occupied the complex, aiming to find a social purpose for it. Afterwards, the Naples municipality gave the occupants the possibility to stay and to run the structure through self-management.	Church complex	The space hosts mutual activities (such as language courses, after-school, sports, dance, and theatre), spaces for coworking, and art and craft labs.	The project is running, but the renovation is partially developed	The management of the space is enabled by Urban Civic Uses, a form of collective right to use that put Scugnizzo Liberato in the hands of the communities
Sargfabrik	Vienna, Austria	Local community	The regeneration was developed as a bottom-up initiative that promoted the reuse of a heritage site and reinterpretation of its narrative, contributing to a profound transformation on a neighborhood level.	Coffin factory	Today the building complex serves both as community housing—integrating people with different lifestyles, ages, and social backgrounds—and as an important recreational center open to the public.	The project is running as the renovation is fully developed	An association oversees the project and the governance is shared among multiple types of stakeholders
Färgfabriken	Stockholm, Sweden	Private actors	The building was abandoned, practically a ruin, when a foundation was funded to restore, renovate and reuse the building. The promoters started by developing art exhibitions and seminars about architecture and urban planning.	Paint factory	Färgfabriken is a platform and exhibition venue for contemporary cultural expressions, with an emphasis on art, architecture, and urban planning.	The project is running as the renovation is fully developed	Färgfabriken’s governance has a foundation structure and is primarily financed by private funds
Largo Residenciâs	Lisbon, Portugal	Private actors	While the renovation was started by a new owner, the building was rented for 10 years by the initiative that renovated it and adapted it to a new use.	Ceramic factory	Largo Residências is a hostel, hotel, artist residence, and café in Lisbon’s fast-changing Intendente neighborhood. However, the building rent will terminate soon.	The project is closed due the inability to renovate the contract. The organization is looking for a new location	Largo Residencias is a cooperative with a democratic governance model
Jewish District	Budapest, Hungary	Private actors	Starting in the mid-2000s, a series of bottom-up initiatives turned abandoned buildings into temporary bars, followed by private investments and citizen initiatives to protect architectural and historical heritage.	Ghetto	The area turned into a center of night life, and, today, it showcases various financing and adaptive re-use models, but also represents the dilemmas of changing functions on a neighborhood scale.	The project is running as the renovation is fully developed	The project is led by private enterprises that collaborate among each other
La Fábrika de toda la vida	Los Santos de Maimona, Spain	Local community	The factory had suffered neglect and vandalism and was in a complete state of disrepair. The community invested and renovated the building creating a space to keep its youth from moving away.	Cement factory	The project created a new cultural hub where the community can socialize, connect, learn, and share.	The project is running, but the renovation is partially developed	The community manages the project thanks to the municipality’s concession of the use of the land in exchange for its maintenance
Halele Carol	Bucharest, Romania	Private actors	The renovations used a marginal approach, which led to the reuse of the building first for cultural events and, in a later stage, to open it to the public.	Hydraulic pumps factory	The current main renter of Halele Carol is Expirat Club, a famous club in Bucharest. Hence, the nature of the activities changed drastically.	The space was rented by another user	Two private organizations, Zeppelin and Eurodite, led the activities
Stará Tržnica	Bratislava, Slovakia	Private actors	The building closed after years of unsuccessful attempts by the municipality to keep the market alive. Years later the market hall reopened with a redevelopment plan proposed by the Alianca Stará Tržnica (Old Market Hall Alliance)	Market Hall	The market hall hosts different activities, such as a food market, cultural events, two cafés, a grocery shop, a cooking school, and soda water manufacture.	The project is running as the renovation is fully developed	The civic association Aliancia Stará Tržnica (Old Market Hall Alliance) is the primary entity involved in the governance and decision-making processes
Potocki Palace	Radzyń Podlask, Poland	Public institutions	The Potocki Palace is a Rococo residence. After varying uses, the appearance of the palace was restored, and the building became the town’s property.	Heritage site	The palace is a cultural facility to integrate the local community, attract tourists, and boost the cultural and social life of the town and surrounding areas.	The project is running but the renovation is partially developed	The municipality is the owner and manager of the site and activities.
ExRotaprint	Berlin, Germany	Local community	When ExRotaprint took over the buildings, they had been neglected for almost 20 Years. Hence, the renovation focused on two elements: to secure the buildings and to clean them of toxic materials.	Printing factory	ExRotaprint rents spaces for various uses to a heterogeneous group of tenants. It supports social projects, productive activities, and artists.	The project is running as the renovation is fully developed	The land is owned by a foundation, but the building is owned by an association that leads also the activities
London CLT	London, UK	Local community	London CLT is London’s first Community Land Trust, supported by the Greater London Authority in collaboration with a private developer and a social housing association.	Psychiatric hospital	CLT allocates 23 homes, privately owned and social housing units. Besides these homes, the CLT also promotes community engagement and is actively working on the creation of a community center.	The project is running as the renovation is fully developed	The London Community Land Trust is a community-led development model, where local non-profit organizations develop and manage homes and other vital assets. Locals, community members, and researchers participate in governance
Jam Factory	Lviv, Ukraine	Private actors	The building was neglected for a decade before grass-roots artist initiatives came to revitalize it. They bought the site in 2015 and its conversion into contemporary art center started. Construction and restoration work began in 2019, and the center opened in 2021.	Alcohol factory	The building is renovated, and the organization has launched educational and grant programs. It is primarily focused on national contemporary art and international cooperations.	The project is running as the renovation is partially developed	The project is managed by a private organization
The Grünmetropole	Grunmetropole, NL, BE, FR	Public institutions	The project aimed to renew the post-industrial landscape, to strengthen the common identity of the region, and to create a touristic impulse by implementing touristic routes.	Mining	The two touristic routes are still present; however, their use is limited to the contributions of the local players.	The project was closed	Different (semi-)governmental actors from different countries are involved and collaborate
Marineterrein	Amsterdam, The Netherlands	Public institutions	In 2013, during the economic crisis, the Ministry of Defence decided to sell the terrain. It started an innovative collaboration between the national government and the municipality, starting a slow transformation of the site.	Navy base	After the renovation. the space is home to many innovative companies in various fields of media, sustainability, technology, and social development.	The project is running as the renovation is fully developed	The Municipality of Amsterdam and the national government lead the activities, involving different private and civic stakeholders.
Citadel	Alba Iulia, Romania	Public institutions	Starting from around 2000, the territory and the buildings were gradually handed over to the city municipality, which has raised more than 60 million euros for the economic, social, and cultural redevelopment of the citadel.	Heritage site	Although the refurbished citadel is one of the top-most tourist attractions of Romania, it is still in the progress of finding appropriate functions for some of its buildings.	The project is running as the renovation is partially developed	The municipality owns the land and fully develops the activities

. Deliverable 2.2. of the Open Heritage Project contains the case studies analysis [120].

Based on this literature review, we define the following expectation: collaboration involves different types of players, and it defines a form of governance that includes them in the decision-making process. However, to succeed, there must be institutional conditions that empower local communities, being either enabling institutions or entrepreneurial activities. Different metrics may be used to assess an ICA’s performance. In this article, urban regeneration performance has more to do with the ability to start a positive cycle that promotes the creation of new services, opportunities, and resources for the city than just with the restoration of the heritage. The study’s outcome is to evaluate how urban regenerative actions are able to promote the regeneration and use of urban abandoned space and to foster activities that contribute to the initiative’s and the territory’s social and economic sustainability. Hence, some actions could not achieve all these three objectives and might not contribute to the flourishing of local economies and communities.

We utilized fsQCA, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, as a method that enabled us to define the configurations (combinations of factors) that determine the performances of urban regeneration actions. Fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) provides a set-theoretic approach to causality analysis, making it possible to understand the relation between a set of conditions and an outcome [121]. In particular, the fuzzy sets make it possible to investigate the relationship between cases’ membership in the conditions and their outcome [122]. They are particularly useful because they allow researchers to calibrate partial membership in sets using values ranging from 0, which represents non-membership, to 1, corresponding to full membership, without losing the subset relation. The subset connection is fundamental to the understanding of causal complexity, as Ragin [123] shows. In addition, fsQCA enables analysis of conjunctural causation and equifinality. The former creates the possibility to analyze the impacts of a combination of conditions rather than one condition alone [122]. The latter refers to the ability of fsQCA to detect multiple causal conditions that can produce the same outcome [124]. Additionally, fsQCA requires that, for each factor, the researcher gives a specific score. Hence, when cases with a similar outcome need to be analyzed, the technique offers a novel way to empirically untangle the relevant combinations of factors that contribute to the determination of the outcome [125,126]. Hence, the analysis requires giving a score to all cases for each set, depending on a predefined scale. For instance, Cascina Roccafranca, an urban regeneration plan in Turin, receives a good rating if we compare it with the group of urban regeneration activities in the enabling institutional capacity condition (in fact, the local government is characterized by its ability to define innovative tools for the regeneration of the spaces). In fsQCA, both the conditions and the outcome need to be converted to fuzzy-set categories (in our case, to a four-scale category). This process enables a fine-grained method to describe what sort of membership a case has in a specific set [127].

Four-value fuzzy sets were used to translate the conditions we chose in the theoretical section on ICAs. The description of these four-value fuzzy sets is shown in

Table 2. Raw data.

Case	Institutional Capacity	Multi-Actor Participation	Entrepreneurship	Co-Governance	Outcome
CascinaRoccafranca	1	1	0.33	0.33	1
ScugnizzoLiberato	1	0.33	1	0	0.33
Sargfabrik	0.66	0.33	0.66	0.66	1
Färgfabriken	0.33	1	0.33	0.66	0.66
LargoResidenciâs	0.33	0.33	0.33	1	0.33
JewishDistrict	0.33	0.33	0.33	1	0.33
LaFábrikadetodalavida	0.66	0.33	1	0	0.33
HaleleCarol	0.33	0	0.33	0.66	0.33
StaráTržnica	0.66	0.66	0.33	1	1
PotockiPalace	0	0.33	0	0	0
ExRotaprint	0.66	0.33	0.66	0.66	0.66
LondonCLT	1	1	0.66	0	1
JamFactory	0.33	0	0	0	0.33
TheGrünmetropole	0.33	0	0.66	0.33	0
Marineterrein	0.66	1	0.33	0.66	1
Citadel	0.33	1	0.33	0.33	0.33

. The first condition in our study pertains to the institutional contexts in which the urban activity took place. A crucial requirement is the enabling capacity of the institutions, mainly public ones, to support the initiatives, both through a favorable environment and thanks to their active engagement [128,129]. Urban revitalization initiatives, therefore, capitalize on the connections and capacity of the institutional environment to support such initiatives. We assigned the regeneration activities a score of 0 when the institutional environment was unfavorable both in terms of intervention and institutional framework. When the institutions’ capacity to intervene and assist regeneration efforts was limited, the score was 0.33. Institutions that assisted the initiative’s completion received a 0.66 rating. Initiatives that could rely on a significant institution enabling participation and contribution scored 1.

The ability of urban regeneration efforts to incorporate various stakeholder groups is the second criterion. The involvement of citizens, academics, and private, civic, and public players is considered a necessary part of the collaboration [130,131]. In accordance with studies on partnerships involving multiple stakeholders, the heterogeneity of involvement in regeneration activities plays a crucial role. Hence, we rated operations that engaged mainly in activities with a single actor 0. Therefore, an additional type of player participating in the initiatives contributes to a rank rise. Initiatives involving two types of players had a ranking of 0.33, while those involving three sorts of players received a score of 0.66. Finally, initiatives that included at least four kinds were rated 1.

The third condition refers to the ability of collective actions—and by extension, actions for urban regeneration—to be promoted in an entrepreneurial manner. The analysis considered the full part of the set projects led by entrepreneurs, as singles, organizations, and in collaborative efforts, and to ensure economic sustainability [132,133]. Initiatives are part of the set if they define a sustainable business model and explore all market opportunities. Even though entrepreneurial activities were present, when the projects did not focus on economic viability, they received a score of 0.66. Additionally, a project with a secondary emphasis on entrepreneurial activities and mindset received a 0.33 score. A project that had no entrepreneurial spirit at all received a score of zero.

Co-governance is mentioned as the last condition. Participation in actions within the governance and decision-making process can boost urban regeneration [134]. As a result, the project received a score of 0 when governance was closed and only a few individuals were involved. Projects with only significant contributors and a limited number of people included in decision-making scored 0.33. Projects that outlined collaborative governance with participation from all internal stakeholders received a 0.66 rating. Finally, initiatives that included people who were not only members of the organization but also part of a larger public in the decision-making process received a score of 1. A more informative model may have been created by adding extra conditions. However, following the standard for this type of analysis, we defined four conditions for our sample, limiting the possibility that our results are the product of random conditions [135].

The management field has seen an increase in adopting the fsQCA approach [136]. Following this trend, we use the Ragin-developed fsQCA approach. The analysis allows focusing on complex configuration links between a collection of causative factors and an outcome of interest rather than isolating, ceteris paribus, the effects of individual explanatory variables on a dependent variable [137]. We utilized fsQCA software, and we followed the instructions set by Ragin [25]. After preliminary analysis to check the dataset’s quality, we performed sufficiency analysis to understand whether a condition or a combination of conditions is sufficient to produce a particular result [124]. We then produced a truth table using the dedicated program that shows how many instances support a logical combination. The preliminary results were produced using binary integers, where 1 indicates the presence of a condition and 0 indicates its absence.

For instance, the London CHL was given the conditions score of 1-1-0-1 for outcome 1. Except for entrepreneurship, the CHL fulfills all conditions and has achieved the result. The program considers each instance individually and summarizes how the examples exhibit a specific pattern, estimating how they arrive at the outcome [138]. In addition, the truth table provides information on two additional factors: consistency and coverage. The most crucial factor is consistency, which shows the degree to which a condition continually produces the same result, being one when, in all cases, the pattern is always respected. To prevent deviant instances in terms of consistency, respecting methodological standards, we set the sufficiency consistency criterion equal to 0.8 [125]. After selecting cases that meet the consistency threshold, we ran the minimization analysis. This analysis enabled us to exhibit the minimum conditions necessary for a determined outcome. Hence, this step allowed the deletion of all the unnecessary conditions for the outcome.

4. Results

The results represent configurations obtained by analyzing the conservative solution, which only considers truth table rows with at least one case [138].

4.1. Are There Necessary Conditions?

The necessary condition analysis reveals that no essential element must be present (or absent) for a regenerative urban initiative. The institutional capacity condition is almost necessary, but the threshold is not met. Ensuring effective regeneration requires more complicated factors, and a combination of factors related to the institutions and the organization of the ICAs determine the performance of the regenerative activities. As a result, we examined whether there are necessary combinations that could ensure the success of such initiatives. The configurations are examined in the following paragraph.

4.2. Are There Sufficient Conditions?

After creating a truth table (

Table 3. Truth table.

Capacity	Multi-Actor	Entrepreneur	Co-Governance	N	Output	Cases	Raw Consist.	PRI Consist.
1	1	0	1	1	1	London CLT	1	1
0	1	1	0	1	1	Fargfabriken	1	1
1	1	0	0	1	1	Cascina Roccafranca	1	1
1	1	1	0	2	1	Starà Trznica Marineterrein	1	1
1	0	1	1	2	1	Sargfabrik ExRotaprint	0.88888	0.7987
0	1	0	0	1	0	Citadel	0.71367	0.5
0	0	0	1	1	0	The Grunmetropole	0.66666	0.3366
1	0	0	1	2	0	Scugnizzo Liberato LaFabrikadetodalavida	0.62546	0.2537
0	0	1	0	3	0	Largo Residencias Jewish district Halele Carol	0.6	0.3366
0	0	0	0	2	0	Potocki Palace Jam Factory	0.49629	0.2

), which displays the configurations and cases in the set, we defined the consistency threshold at 0.8 [138], eliminating those that did not meet the condition. Hence the minimization process enables focusing only on a limited number of combinations, and reduces the extent of the combinations, enabling understanding of which are the sufficient conditions. From this step, three possible configurations of conditions appear to explain the performance of urban regeneration activities, covering seven cases.

The fact that multi-actor participation is regarded as a core condition in seven out of nine cases provides a first insight into how much the participation of different stakeholders is fundamental to the performances of ICAs. Alternatively, the lack of multi-actor participation is compensated by the definition of co-governance arrangements in combination with entrepreneurship and enabling institutional capacity (in two cases). To summarize the results, there are three recipes for achieving urban regeneration initiatives, as are displayed in Figure 1. The configurations are examined in the next paragraph.

Configuration 1: Multi-actor participation, enabling institutional capacity, and effective urban regeneration initiatives

This configuration explains how four regeneration actions work. A good illustration of the configuration is Cascina Roccafranca. The term regeneration action refers to the restoration and return to community use, management, co-ownership of a publicly owned area. Therefore, the project’s success is attributable to the local government’s capacity to intervene directly in the project and ensure the connection of the initiatives to the institutional environment. Hence, the two central interventions by the public were the assembled funding from various sources and the establishment of a model that served as a facilitator for the local community. Thanks to the government’s experience and ability, the project could apply for European tenders and develop new tools for regeneration actions, creating the conditions for the area’s development. The second component refers to the willingness to involve various players in activities run in the space. The initiatives involve local businesses, associations, and citizens, enabling them to contribute to different extents. The participation of different stakeholders empowered the promotion of many different initiatives in the space. Hence, the enabling role of public administration and multi-actor participation guaranteed that the area was revitalized and that local players could participate in the revitalization efforts, ensuring the project’s long-term economic and social viability.

Configuration 2: Multi actor-participation, entrepreneurship, and effective urban regeneration initiatives

Urban regeneration initiatives are effective because they support entrepreneurship while enrolling many participants. Starà Trznica is an excellent example of this mix, representing two other cases. While allowing room for promoters and other efforts, the engagement of several stakeholders had a significant impact on the effectiveness of the regeneration measures in the Starà Trznica case. The project first developed a regeneration plan utilizing an entrepreneurial framework, in which all costs associated with the regeneration and development of the space were to be met by the income of the activities. Thanks to this mentality, the promoters could negotiate a unique plan with the government for the rent and repair of the property. This strategy allowed the promoters to create new activities, bring back old ones, and restore the structure. Second, the project had many local contributors. The participation of the public authorities ensures the pursuit of overall advantages by the initiative’s owner and controller. The program also involved a wide range of neighborhood companies and groups, which helped to fill the area with new initiatives. The building offered the neighborhood new services and a place to congregate, browse local items, and pass the time. Together, these two elements created the ideal institutional framework to ensure the building’s long-term viability. The entrepreneurial attitude determined financial viability, but, on the other side, incorporating many stakeholders prevented mission drift and contributed to achieving the social aims of regeneration.

Configuration 3: Co-governance, entrepreneurship, enabling institutional capacity, and effective urban regeneration initiatives

Co-governance, entrepreneurship, and enabling institutional capacity are combined in three initiatives. The co-governance condition is sufficient for sustainable urban regeneration when entrepreneurship and institutional capacity are present. Therefore, as we can see in the Sargfabrik case, regeneration could be based on a “closed” community without involving multiple stakeholders. However, to make this happen, the neighborhood must be fully included in the initiative’s governance, the community needs to develop entrepreneurial activities, and there must be empowering institutional conditions. These elements are necessary to create conditions for lowering the risk of gentrification and lock-in. In the Sargfabrik case, residents established democratic rules for managing the area, the local government promoted an urban development environment, and supportive housing policy and entrepreneurs participated in the definition of the activities. Therefore, the organization was positioned to meet the needs of smaller and larger communities and the neighborhood by establishing social, cultural, and educational functions. Due to its capacity to support a new housing model where the neighborhood serves as the focal point and driving force behind the development of the area, the project created the conditions for the building to be restored and to become a symbol for urban regeneration at the national and European levels.

4.3. Analysis of Sufficient Conditions of Failing Urban Regeneration Initiatives

After this first analysis, we explored the configurations for the lack of outcomes, analyzing the conditions for failing urban regeneration initiatives. We first created a truth table, setting the threshold for sufficient conditions at 0.8 (

Table 4. Truth table for the lack of the outcome.

Capacity	Multiactor	Entrepreneur	Co-Governance	N	Output	Cases	Raw Consist.	PRI Consist.
0	0	0	0	2	1	Potocki Palace Jam Factory	0.874074	0.8
0	1	0	1	2	1	Scugnizzo Liberato La Fabrikadetodalavida	0.872659	0.746269
0	0	0	1	1	1	The Grunmetropole	0.830846	0.663366
1	0	0	0	3	0	Largo Residencias Jewish district Halele Carol	0.797015	0.663366
1	1	0	1	2	0	Sargfabrik ExRotaprint	0.558923	0.20122
0	0	1	0	1	0	Citadel	0.713675	0.5
1	0	1	0	1	0	Fargfabriken	0.555184	0
0	1	1	1	1	0	London CLT	0.5	0
1	1	1	0	2	0	Starà Trznica Marineterrein	0.454545	0
0	1	1	0	1	0	Cascina Roccafranca	0.370787	0

).

In addition, we analyzed sufficient circumstances through the minimization process, revealing one configuration leading to failing initiatives (Figure 2). Five cases can be attributed to this outcome. According to the analysis, single-player efforts and a lack of entrepreneurial activity create an institutional configuration that fails the regeneration goals. Since urban regeneration necessitates economic and social circumstances, the absence of both entrepreneurship and actors’ involvement causes a negative feedback loop that restricts the regeneration and growth of the area.

Configuration 4: Single-player initiatives, lack of entrepreneurship, and failing urban regeneration initiatives

Urban regeneration efforts need more entrepreneurial activity and proximity to external players to accelerate and mobilize local forces. We can consider the initiative La Fabrika de Toda la Vida. Like other cases in this research, this Spanish project exemplified an intriguing and productive endeavor by forging a community connected to the structure and promoting new services and possibilities because of this engagement. The initiative, however, could only partially transform the area and provide the necessary infrastructure for its activities to continue in the future. This is because many stakeholder groups were not involved, which made it challenging to ensure that the project would not become mired in the local conditions. The lack of external involvement limited the presence of novel perspectives and points of view, which are even more important than the available resources. Additionally, the entrepreneurial activities did not compel the initiative to consider the expense and revenue of the activities, therefore bolstering the plan’s transparency. Therefore, the lack of success was brought on by the community’s inability to define a new hybrid model, in which economic activities are acknowledged as essential for the long term. The initiative’s inability to explore new opportunities translated into a lack of involvement of external players (for example, corporations that could bring resources and new projects). Without both, urban regeneration efforts will be unable to garner outside support and will find it challenging to bring in new project resources, ideas, and talent.

5. Discussion

Institutional collective action is hailed as a solution for delivering public services and urban regeneration initiatives [5,6,139]. These collaborations are viewed in this context as a collective result created by a network of actors related to its institutional environment [7,140]. Most of the research on institutional collective actions has concentrated on their nature, problems, and boundaries [9,22,141] rather than providing insight into how configurations of factors (internal and external to the initiatives) lead to successful services and results. This paper sought to understand the factors that affect whether an ICA can regenerate an area and start sustainable activities.

In our qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), we expanded on the ICA theory and institutional setting framework [4], translating the theory into multiple conditions and defining a new integrated framework. Enabling institutional capacity was the prerequisite for understanding the role of the institutional environment [51,52]; multi-actor participation was required for understanding the effects of stakeholders’ involvement [81]; co-governance was required for understanding the internal decision making [73,106,112]; and entrepreneurship was required for long-term economic and social sustainability [82]. Hence, our analysis demonstrates that these conditions can only be regarded as essential for the prosperity of urban regeneration initiatives. In essence, our research demonstrates that many conditions guarantee successful outcomes. The configurations of various influencing factors should be the main point of interest for anyone wishing to comprehend effective ICAs. With this result, we stress the importance of an ecosystemic approach considering different elements and levels in collective actions [22].

Our essential contribution to the literature is that, thanks to our QCA, we demonstrated that different combinations of conditions for collective actions are necessary for effective urban regeneration initiatives. It is not novel to think that other ICAs’ success might depend on different conditions [12]. This study, however, shows specific configurations that envisage a multi-stakeholder or a co-governance model. The first factor for successful collective action foresees multi-actor governance combined with institutional capacity or entrepreneurial activities. The second finding requires putting collective governance in combination with institutional capacity and entrepreneurship. As a result, we demonstrated the importance of supporting institutional collective actions involving different types of stakeholders [111] and working on the institutional setting, offering to the local communities the tools for collaboration with other stakeholders and to start entrepreneurial activities.

The significance but insufficiency of multiple stakeholders is especially intriguing considering the current collaborative trend, which envisages collaboration among players as the unique solution [11]. Our findings suggest that encouraging sustainable collaborative actions is essential when considering the ability of institutional players to become entrepreneurs. Institutional players can be a local government that provides the conditions for the community to be involved [54,66] or entrepreneurs that participate in a collaborative form of entrepreneurship [94,95]. Hence, collaborations of different stakeholders, primarily civic, social, knowledge, public, and private actors, require finding a local promoter or anchor to link the initiative to the territory and make things happen. This broadens theoretical understanding of the governance model of innovation and the role that public involvement and local community empowerment play in delivering ICAs. Additionally, our analysis revealed that, while small communities could create ICAs, in these cases, ICAs require the simultaneous presence of an enabling institutional setting and entrepreneurs to achieve good performance. This finding points to an ecosystems approach to ICAs and, more broadly, to public services, highlighting the need for correspondence between organizations and their institutional settings [7]. With these requirements, ICAs can align interests by matching objectives and community resources [22]. A multidisciplinary approach to ICAs’ embeddedness points to the necessity of an integrated perspective on cooperation [23,24]. Hence, we open the doors to future analysis of how new innovative legal and institutional forms of collaboration could support the promotion of qualifying conditions at different levels. An example of these new innovative schemas is community cooperatives, as organizations that enable different groups to work together with democratic governance and improve the territory’s social and economic welfare [142].

Our outcomes provide intriguing nuance and support our theoretical notions of ICAs. We could not, however, generalize the results of our sample. Even though we selected urban regeneration initiatives because of their collaborative features and relations with the institutional settings, this sample does not represent the variety of ICAs. Thus, urban regeneration actions and ICAs might involve different players, such as academia, financial institutions, and other sectors, and technological solutions that we both should have considered in this analysis. Consequently, future studies could check if configurations in other domains lead to the same outcomes. Hence, it would be interesting to compare the findings of other types of ICAs to see if they lead to the same results. Finally, the selection of the cases, the conditions, and the methodology enabled us to focus on some institutional and organizational elements of ICAs. However, it would be critical to deepen the knowledge of ICAs’ relations with the institutional environment, including additional conditions, and to study the processes of collaboration to understand the multilevel influences on ICAs better.

6. Conclusions

The thesis advanced in this study was that collaboration includes different typologies of individuals and establishes a form of governance that involves them in decision-making. To succeed, however, institutional circumstances that empower local communities, such as enabling institutions or entrepreneurial activity, must exist. For these reasons, urban regeneration activities have been outlined through the interpretation of OpenHeritage case studies that shared the intention of valorizing the role of communities. The identification of four criteria: enabling institutional capacity, multi-actor participation, entrepreneurship, and co-governance, ensured evaluation of broad conditions that the scientific literature recognizes to be connected to the performance of ICAs. Therefore, there were several advantages of utilizing fsQCA. These included the handling of fuzzy, or unclear, membership in sets, which is significant in social sciences research because categories are frequently ambiguous. The approach could handle both qualitative and quantitative data, allowing for a more extensive examination of situations with numerous causes and various outcomes, offering a more nuanced view of causation than regression analysis. Our findings suggest that the three best-performing configurations (multi-actor participation, enabling institutional capacity; multi actor-participation, entrepreneurship; co-governance, entrepreneurship, and enabling institutional capacity) may be relevant to a diverse range of sectors and intervention sizes.