The project articulates in the following integrated steps:

🔲 OBSERVE AND ANALYSE: 
What makes civic spaces in Europe truly distinctive? What allows some to thrive where others struggle?
These are the questions that drove our research phase. Across four European countries, we set out to build a grounded, evidence-based understanding of civic spaces: what they are, what they do, and what conditions allow them to flourish.
Our approach combined four complementary lines of inquiry:
Literature review – Mapping the existing body of knowledge to identify the frameworks that best explain how civic spaces function and why they matter.
Field research – Going directly to civic spaces on the ground to examine the organisational, spatial, political, and relational conditions that shape their vitality.
Good practice mapping – Tracing the diverse landscape of civic spaces already at work across Europe, from formally institutionalised models to grassroots initiatives, and drawing out lessons that can travel.
Participatory expert reviews – Bringing specialist knowledge into dialogue to sharpen, challenge, and enrich our findings with direct field experience.

Explore the key outputs of this phase:

• Civic Spaces in the EU
• Review of Civic Spaces in Catalonia, Rome, Torino, Torres Vedras and Warsaw

🔲 LEARN AND NETWORK:
How can good practices ‘travel’? How can they take root somewhere new?
Knowledge grows richer when it moves. Our exchange and mutual learning phase was built on exactly this conviction, bringing together a set of interconnected actions designed to turn insight into shared understanding — across cities, borders, and communities.
🌍 Transnational missions & study visits – Direct encounters with civic spaces in their real contexts across our five project territories: Rome, Torres Vedras, Barcelona, Turin, and Warsaw. Because some learning only happens through presence, conversation, and first-hand observation.
🧪 Local focus groups, workshops & policy labs – Gathering practitioners, communities, and decision-makers in each territory to test, challenge, and refine the ideas at the heart of B.RIGHT SPACES. Not passive forums but live spaces where concepts met lived experience.
💻 Webinars – Extending the conversation beyond borders and bringing wider audiences into sustained reflection on civic spaces, the policy frameworks that shape them, and the models for meaningful stakeholder engagement.

Explore the outputs of this phase:

• The Guidelines for the successful protection and promotion of civic spaces
• National workshops outcomes and policy labs findings
• Webinars outcomes and findings

🔲 FOSTER CIVIC SPACES: 
Who bears responsibility for civic spaces? Who must be brought into the work of building and protecting them?
Civic spaces require deliberate support, active advocacy, and the kind of institutional commitment that turns goodwill into durable policy. B.RIGHT SPACES rose to that challenge with a concrete and ambitious set of proposals.
🏛️ International Symposium – Convening key actors around an urgent question: what role should institutions play in fostering genuine public-community collaboration, and how can that role be exercised with real accountability and depth?
📜 The B.RIGHT SPACES Charter for the Defenders of Civic Spaces – A foundational document bringing together joint statements, pledges, and commitments by those who work to keep civic spaces alive, accessible, and meaningful.
🗺️ Online Platform – Hosting the cartography of civic spaces mapped across the EU, making visible what is too often overlooked, and giving defenders a shared point of reference and coordination.
📋 Policy recommendations for local authorities – Translating the project’s findings into actionable guidance, so that those with the power to legislate, fund, and protect can do so with clarity, purpose, and a genuine understanding of what is at stake.
🤝 Rooting the work in the social and solidarity economy – Through the engagement of REVES and its membership, the project’s ambitions connect directly to an established network that already shares civic spaces’ core values: mutuality, participation, democratic governance, and collective care. A guarantee that this work lives on beyond the project itself.

Explore the outputs of this phase:

• The EU Charter for the Defenders of Civic Spaces
• The platform for European civic spaces (external link)
• The B.RIGHT SPACES capacity-building package
• The policy recommendations