Networks and cities' news

Focus on Thessaloniki (GR): testing the Housing First methodology on a small scale

Just last month, a homeless man, Kostas Pavlidis, known to most Salonicans strolling in the city center died on the streets in the center of the city amidst a rare cold wave soaring across the country. He had for a period of time stayed at the homeless shelter run by the Municipality, was known to Municipal and NGO homeless services but it was clearly not enough nor tailored to support a homeless person with multiple issues. The details of this specific case aside, the truth is that homeless shelters have not proven to be the most effective
long-term solution to homelessness and in times of crisis, so bluntly evident during the pandemic, shelters were unable to ensure protection, safety and health services to most homeless, let alone cover complex needs of individuals in a street situation.

Focus on Timisoara (RO) - How knowledge can contribute to fighting homelessness

Timisoara decided to join the ROOF network because, like in many other European cities, homelessness is more and more present and we wanted to learn new ways towards ending it. Housing First approach to end homelessness is seen as the most effective especially when working with people with complex social needs. During the transnational meetings we could see good examples of how this approach is used in more than half of the cities from the ROOF network to successfully improve the life of people and take them out of homelessness. Still Romania and Timisoara were not familiar with the Housing First approach and most of the URBACT Local Group members never heard of it. So, we decided that in order to draw an accurate and achievable Integrated Action Plan we need to use the Small-Scale Actions to gain more knowledge on Housing First approach.

Torino (IT) - Fifth ULG Meeting, March 17 2022

The fifth Urbact Local Group (ULG) of Turin took place on 17 march 2022 at Beeozanam Community Hub, via Foligno 14.

Biodiversity in cities depends on pollinators as much as on responsible residents

Without bees 75% of our food plants would not yield any fruits at all, there would be a major economy loss in crop production, wildflowers would not ripen seeds and biodiversity would drastically decrease. Numerous great initiatives started lately to protect bees and their pollinator counterparts – they deserve our support as they also help us.

To support cities administration initiative on biodiversity preservation and to show them diverse good practices on how to involve their citizens, institutions and economy to play active role in it BeePathNet cities developed Guidelines – The evolution steps toward a Bee friendly city supported with good practices.

The second newsletter is all abuzz about Biodiversity

With this newsletter, we begin a series of theme dedicated newsletters, each linked to one of our partner cities.

This issue is all about biodiversity in cities which depends on pollinators as much as on responsible residents. This theme is in the hands of Osijek (Croatia) and was discussed in depth on our partnership thematic meeting in November 2021. You can also read all about it, find out what took place since the last newsletter was issued and what will be going on in our partner cities in the next few months and in the process learn a thing or two about bees.

URBACT AD HOC EXPERTS INTERVIEW THE RU:RBAN CITIES OF THE SECOND WAVE

We are all familiar with mid-term reports, evaluation and progress reports, spreadsheets and all relevant tools available to measure results and overall completion of expected activities. There is, however, one aspect that we don’t seem to take into account when preparing all these documents: human perception, in other words “how do partners perceive the project’s implementation and progress?”.