Networks and cities' news

Accommodating and integrating refugees in the city of Thessaloniki: the multi-stakeholder programme REACT

Thessaloniki has been at the forefront of the management crisis of refugee flows. The city launched its emergency response in 2015, just before the closure of the Balkan Route and the EU-Turkey common statement of March 2016. In 2016, three times more people applied for asylum in Greece than the year before, with 51,092 asylum applications, compared with 13,195 in 2015. And as the ‘temporariness’ of the transit refugee population has evolved to become semi-temporary to potentially permanent, a strategic urban response has been all the more essential. With this in mind, the Municipality of Thessaloniki, with support from the URBACT network Arrival Cities, is drafting an Integrated Action Plan (IAP) to provide a holistic inclusion and integration strategy coordinating key state and non-state actors. As a partner in Arrival Cities, Thessaloniki formed an URBACT Local Group, which helped to create a multi-stakeholder consortium for the REACT programme. This type of consortium for managing refugee integration is a first in Greece, and has been considered as best practice by the UN refugee agency UNHCR.

REACT programme and the role of the URBACT local group

Grosseto – Covid round-trip

As you well know, here in Italy we didn’t have time to realize what was going on and was going to happen … and all the sudden, we were all on lock-down, between the 9th and 11th march.

The power of civic ecosystems: Learning from the ACTive NGOs network

After three years of joint work, the ACTive NGOs URBACT Transfer Network has arrived to its final months. In these three years, the cities of Riga, Brighton and Hove, Dubrovnik, Espoo, Santa Pola and Syracuse have been working together on creating spaces for civic initiatives and stronger civic ecosystems around them. This article explores the broader context of this work and some of the key achievements of the partner cities.

Viladecans ULG as a driver group

Viladecans’ Good Practice, the Educational Innovation Network (EIN) was created in 2013, and since then it has been working to develop projects to promote educational innovation and educational success by fostering the collaboration of different city stakeholders mainly, school and teachers, families and companies.

Tropa Verde in Opole Agglomeration (Transfer Story)

In 2018-19, in Poland they were facing many problems related to waste management, such as landfill fires often organised by the so- called "garbage mafia", illegal landfills, abandoned waste, etc. Also, the knowledge of sorting waste wasn’t good enough.

Enriching the urban jungle with bees

How Ljubljana inspired Cesena to address the fundamental role that pollinators play in ecosystems and in urban environments.