The project is one of the first examples of public sector organisations addressing the challenges of the gig economy by actively engaging in the creation of an alternative to platforms. Ethical Deliveries is co-designed by citizens, traders, trade unions, riders and citizens which generated a cooperative governance in antithesis with the vertical organisational of the platforms. In the system of platform capitalism about 30 percent of a trader's earnings goes to platforms: Ethical Deliveries ensures fairness by having them managed directly by local organisations and providing riders with a minimum wage of 9 euro/hour net - almost double the average wage that riders usually earn - as well as worker protection. It involves the use of sustainable means of transport using bicycles and cargo-bikes has no environmental impact. It encourages citizens to make ethical and conscious choices, knowing that an ethical home delivery service that respects the rights of workers, traders, and the environment is possible. The project demonstrates that cities can be promoters of new municipalist models enabling collaboration, distributing value, and being no longer spaces from which private companies extract value.

So far, 3873 ethical deliveries have been made, and even after the pandemic emergency, the services have remained active, developing the part with more social impact, distributing books from libraries and basic necessities in two particularly fragile areas of Bologna. Now starting form what we have seen that the model works, the goal is to create a larger alternative business model.

Ethical Deliveries is the result of a public participatory process that involved citizens, traders, researchers, riders, riders' unions, public administration, public libraries, cooperatives, such as Dynamo and Idee in Movimento, AlmaVicoo, and companies. The cooperation of these actors resulted in the co-design imagined and designed by the Civic Imagination Office of the Fondazione Innovazione Urbana.

The primary beneficiaries of Ethical Deliveries are the riders and the traders. However, citizens and administrations benefit from it too, for three reasons:

• Ethical Deliveries reduce the impact on the environment.
• It has built networks and communities based on cooperation and proximity.
• The presence of Ethical Deliveries fosters the development of a collective consciousness of the power of the consumer to make the market fair and and sustainable.

The number of companies, riders, and traders who have joined the project, as well as the number of deliveries made weekly, have been documented through the website in order to monitor the operation and effectiveness of the project. Specifically, currently 3873 ethical deliveries have been made and many services have been activated such as home lending with 14 municipal libraries and 32 university libraries, home shopping with 2 markets and 2 supermarket, food delivery with 3 restaurants, and home meal delivery to vulnerable people. Further, we produced documentary on riders in Bologna (https://www.openddb.stream/film/le-consegne-etiche/), our project was covered on Wired international, and we won the Compasso d'Oro price, one of the oldest and most influential design awards worldwide. Our goal for the future is to implement the digital and distribution infrastructure by involving the public administration, and to engage new businesses while supporting community governance whereby everyone is co-responsible and co-participant in the collective future.

Cities are often seen as passive victims of large platforms. The dominant idea is that cities are powerless over the worrying situations for riders' and traders' working conditions. However, moving beyond the manifesto of values, we have co-designed Ethical Deliveries and demonstrated that an alternative to capitalist platforms is possible through the creation of alliances oriented toward the same purposes. In addition to providing food delivery services, Ethical Deliveries has evolved into a relationship-carrier. Our riders, in fact, are not passive workers but they identify with an ethical platform. Citizens are conscious of this, as do merchants: which is why the cooperative concept with collaborative governance works. Unfortunately, the failures we are facing is that we are not currently scaling the prototype, and we have not yet determined whether we should focus on food delivery or home service, or logistics.

Several aspects fostered the success of the project:

• A bold political vision, which was able to provide value-based direction by clearly identifying the goal.
• The context, as Bologna is characterized by strong cooperative movements, a vibrant riders’ union, the first in Italy, and several organizations that during the lockdown demonstrated significant innovation skills.
• The process of citizens' consultation, which yielded creativity, dynamism, and concrete engagement.
• The awareness that one does not make public policy alone, but needs to create movement by addressing a concrete need of citizens and workers.
• The attention devoted to taking care of relationships and to create alliances.
• The realization of a prototype through which to strengthen relationships and direct further development of the project.
• The co-design has it given value to the creativity of the many communities already active in the cities.

The innovation has not been replicated yet but our plan is to scale it and also get in touch with other municipalities.

From our project, we learned that to reinvigorate the collective idea of the city, we need to discuss power, time, space, and empathy. Specifically, we learned:

• The significance of empowering the stakeholders; if we want to redesign a service, or a policy, we have to reimagine the power balance giving more resources to the stakeholder that became partners.
• The necessity of giving the community time to form and cooperate. After years of approaches focused on individualism, we must take time to convey a new way of doing: only with care for relationships we can rebuild relationships between people and civic realities, no longer used to creating alliances.
• We know that in neighborhood relations there is more trust: we can resume relationships and clearly find needs to respond to, but we need to activate paths especially with the realities already active in the area.
• In face of social, political and economic challenges, in addition to multi-professional skills, it is necessary empathy. We have digital tools and enormous capabilities, but empathy is the main skill otherwise we will have innovations for a few.

It is not just a question of linking creativity, research, administration, economic organizations and citizenship, but of identifying a design approach that overcomes the models now in crisis, enhancing the skills and energies that cross the cities. In the social, health and entrepreneurial fields, there is no lack of examples of experimentation that adopt a new concept of organizational care. Ethic deliveries have tried to rethink the forms of design, t building a new collective response, redesigning the asymmetries of power betwnn cities and digital platform. Starting from a conviction: co-production is not the emblem of a retreat of organization in favor of communities that solve their own problems independently, but a mechanism for recovering energy and creating new type of organization.