Fairville is an international and collaborative research project funded by Horizon Europe (the EU’s funding programme for research and innovation) for the period 2023-2026¹.
 
The Fairville project aims to address embedded urban inequalities and the challenges they pose to democracy in large cities and urban regions. It will achieve this by supporting co-production in low-income neighbourhoods that face increasing disconnection from the institutions and processes of representative democracy.
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Co-production is here understood as bottom-up collaboration processes aimed at reinvigorating local democratic engagement among four main types of partners: civil society organisations (CBOs and ‘ordinary’ residents and users), academics and researchers, third-party facilitators or advocacy organisations, and local authorities. The co-production dynamics observed in the project, most of which stem from local citizens’ mobilisations, aim to respond to urgent needs related to three main challenges: the environment, risks, and access to decent housing. Through these different themes, the project also addresses the issue of respect for citizens' fundamental rights in a context of declining democracy.
 
The project intends to use participatory action research and the co-production of knowledge as strategies of spatial justice to address urban inequalities affecting cities, mainly in Europe but also in Africa. The research project is based on eight Fairville labs, all linked to citizen-led initiatives run by local groups partnering with the project, in eight European and African cities (Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Cairo, Calarasi, Dakar, London and Marseille). In these eight labs, the project implements, supports, and/or accompanies local collaborative actions to understand the capacity of co-production to tackle inequalities and reduce democratic gaps.