Fostering resilient communities and building wealth in today’s local economies is necessary to achieve individual, regional, and national economic security.

The European Urban Knowledge Network (EUKN) presented at the beginning of the Italian Presidency of the EU a report on the socio-economic and spatial dimensions of poverty in Europe. The study provides an overview of urban poverty in the European context and analyses good practices in various European cities.

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This study takes advantage of many years of direct action research, based in consulting and working with people across Ontario and Canada and focused generally at looking at the experience of poverty. Throughout two major consultations, “The People’s Parliament on Poverty” at the provincial level and “the Federal Contribution to Reducing Poverty in Canada” at the federal level it became obvious that there was no real coordinated policy effort that combines economic sustainability and social benefit on behalf of those most at risk and marginalized in our communities.