1. CAMOE Community Action Makes the Ordinary Extraordinary
Fernando Giannella
Flavio Michele Ceci
Ruggiero Scommegna

2. CAMOE Innovation Design approach
European cities – especially in the s.c. “lagging regions” – suffer of a persistent maintenance deficit. Activists, volunteers, community services, and citizens are often taking the place of public administration, acting spontaneously on their environment under exceptional circumstances. The project aims at creating an operative digital framework for their actions. Camoe is a participatory maintenance hub, working as a direct link between the citizen’s smartphone and the administration database.
Design approach
Camoe follows a «subsidiarity-by-design» approach, creating a gentle nudge toward a better care of urban environments through a responsive digital tool. The visual and temporal dimensions of the intervention requests are also taken into account, simplifying the relationship between citizen and administration. Overall, Camoe believes in a new wave of locally-centered digital infrastructure which closer to their users, more sustainable and more flexible.

3. CAMOE Relation to the urbanscape Scaling up prospects
Our feasibility study addresses legal, strategic and urbanistic implications of participatory maintenance in a subsidiary regime. Synchronisation and data cleaning of public administrations databases is a priority, together with an accurate representation of community interests, ranging from subjects inside the workfare scheme, administrators and professional contractors.
Scaling up prospects
Camoe is being designed to be fully scalable and transferable throughout the EU, and embedded into local or municipal maintenance systems and procedures. It requires an high degree of cooperation from the public administrations. Ordinary maintenance is about small things that matter, and this is particularly true in the peripheral areas and in the lagging regions of Europe. For this reason, Camoe looks up at priorities of the EC’s agenda such as Urban Inclusion and Urban Poverty, and to the Lagging Regions Initiative.

4. CAMOE
How does
it work?