The co-production of resilience in European urban neighbourhoods is explored based on the experiences from a case study. Within the current 'resilience imperative', co-production processes involving multiple stakeholders can be a key factor for increasing cities' resilience. Co-produced resilience processes are more successful when embedded in collaborative forms of governance such as those associated with urban commons and when fulfilling needed roles with a community. Through the application of the R-Urban approach in a neighbourhood of Colombes (near Paris), the co-production of a commons-based resilience strategy is described. This involved a group of designers as initiators and a number of citizen as stakeholders of a network of civic hubs. The specific strategies involving a participatory setting, collective governance aspects and circular economies are analysed in the light of co-production theories and practices. Internal and external challenges are identified within the implementation process. The nature of conflicts and negotiations in this co-production approach are discussed, and the role of the architects/designers as agents within the process is investigated. Reflections from this example are provided on the limits and promises of this approach and the lessons learned from R-Urban for collaborative civic resilience.

In this article, we present a method for valuing the multidimensional aspects of urban commons. This method draws from and contributes to a broader conception of social or community returns on investment, using the case and data of a vibrant project, strategy, and model of ecological resilience, R‐Urban, on the outskirts of Paris. R‐Urban is based on networks of urban commons and collective hubs supporting civic resilience practices. We use data from 2015, the year before one of the hubs was evicted from its site by a municipal administration that could not see the value of an “urban farm” compared to a parking lot. We combine estimates of the direct revenues generated for a host of activities that took place in R‐Urban, including an urban farm, community recycling centre, a greenhouse, community kitchen, compost school, café, a teaching space, and a mini‐market. We then estimate the market value of volunteer labour put into running the sites, in addition to the value of training and education conducted through formal and informal channels, and the new jobs and earnings that were generated due to R‐Urban activity. Finally, we estimate the monetary value of the savings made by an environmentally conscious design that focused on water recycling, soil and biodiversity improvement, and social and health benefits, breaking them down by savings to the organization, participants and households involved in R‐Urban itself, as well as savings to the state and the planet. Although our article is built on specific quantities from a concrete project, the method has wide applicability to urban commons of many types seeking to demonstrate the worth and value of all their many facets and activities.

Where the welfare state has failed, can a new civic economy succeed? Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu co‐founded atelier d'architecture autogérée to explore participatory urbanism as an answer to today's environmental and economic challenges. One result is R‐Urban, a framework centred around ‘civic hubs’ that allows communities to enhance their resilience through a range of interconnected initiatives. Implemented in neighbourhoods in the Paris area and London, it can be adapted to any location and scaled up to have an impact on a regional level and beyond.

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In Nicolae Ceausescu's ‘Systematisation’ programme, implemented across Romania throughout the 1980s, power was played out in acts of building. The city of Bucharest provided a visible symbol of the centralisation of authority, manifest in the construction of the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism and the House of the People. Beginning from this historical context, this paper revisits the work of one group of student architects in Romania, Form-Trans-Inform, who used spatial practices to question orthodoxies in architecture around them as protests against repressions under the monolithic Ceausescu regime.