Networks and cities' news

What was this BeePathNet journey? An open door to new adventures!

Nea Propontida was, and still is, a municipality with lots of beekeepers. However there were no honey bees in urban areas till recently. The increased awareness of the people, the disappearance of bees as well as the high interest on the bee products, has resulted in increasing awareness on environmental issues, such as the quality of life in urban areas, the use of agrochemicals and their adverse effects and environmental pollution.

The bees – equal city residents of Ljubljana

The beekeeping tradition in Ljubljana and its outskirts dates back to the time of first prehistoric settlements. A bee and a beehive are on the oldest door sign in the city at the City Savings Bank (Mestna hranilnica) on Čop Street. As many as 3% of all Slovenian beekeepers with over 4500 beehives are active in the area of the City of Ljubljana and urban beekeeping is now flourishing in Ljubljana.

Pollinators on the rise

The Municipality of the 12th District (Hegyvidék) is the local government body responsible for the administration of Budapest’s greenest district, a hilly, partly suburban area in the western part of the Hungarian capital. As the greenest district, Hegyvidék has a huge responsibility to keep an eye on its greenery, to inform and communicate with the residents and to raise their awareness regarding environmental issues, which is why a Green Office, that is responsible for this complex role, had been established in 2016.

A FOOD WASTE URBAN APPROACH

To reduce the depletion of natural resources, limit environmental impacts, and make the food system more circular.

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.