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Housing for all - Experiences of URBACT cities on affordable housing

What can be done to avoid evictions? How can a city provide housing to the most vulnerable groups and to the young talented people? Can low-carbon housing be affordable?
Barcelona (ES), Dupnitsa (BG) and Poznan (PL) – 3 URBACT Good Practice cities - have developed interesting initiatives to work towards “Housing for All”, looking at the social, environmental and physical aspects of housing policies.

Affordable Housing: the issue makes its come back on the European Agenda

Building an effective entrepreneurship eco-system

How can cities create effective programmes for promoting enterprise and entrepreneurship? How should cities respond to some of the structural changes currently taking place in the business start-up market?

With an estimated 100 million businesses starting up across the globe annually, an increasing number adopting innovative business models (built, for example, around the ‘sharing’ or ‘gig’ economy) and the number of sole-trader businesses increasing annually, this is clearly a highly active and increasingly disruptive marketplace.

Among all URBACT Good Practices, Glasgow (co-operative entrepreneurship), Bologna (creative entrepreneurship), Piraeus (marine sector based entrepreneurship); and Barcelona (inclusive entrepreneurship) provide interesting examples on how to create impactful city-wide ‘ecosystems’ for promoting enterprise and entrepreneurship.  

What are ‘entrepreneurship eco-systems’?

Integration processes at city level: Hamburg, Ghent, Amadora URBACT cities Good Practices

The refugee reception crisis of 2015-2016 brought to fore the need for common European patterns of reception and inclusion. For long decades Europe has integrated immigrants and refugees, more or less successfully through to different procedures. In most of the cases integration is carried out without any steady plan and organisational structures.

As such, Municipalities over Europe facing directly the challenge of integration have responded to the reception needs with different approaches and according to variegated policy patterns. URBACT has selected some city-based examples of migrants and refugees integration, recently awarded as Good Practice. Some of these practices have been presented and discussed at the URBACT City Festival in Tallinn, October 2017, namely the cases of the city of Amadora, Ghent and Hamburg. This paper is the outcome of the session “migrants and refugees” at the City festival, introduced by an overview of the refugee reception crisis in Europe by K. Tsitslikis, Prof. in Human Rights Law at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, GR.

Migrants Reception crisis: A European issue

How do URBACT Good Practices strive towards more sustainability together with citizens and other stakeholders?

Striving towards sustainability together

The occurrences and types of events and catastrophes related to climate change (environmental , biodiversity, human, social or societal concerns) have been constantly increasing for more than a century and especially in the last decades. Although these are mostly observed at meta level, it is a local level that both public authorities and citizens should act to implement and undertake concrete actions for a wide societal change. Some URBACT Good Practices understood it quite well and are developing not only sustainable strategies that are local and concrete, but also participatory ones: this is what Manchester (UK), Santiago de Compostela (ES), Milan (IT) and Tallinn (EE) addressed during the “Together for sustainability panel” of the URBACT City Festival held in Tallinn, Estonia on 5 October 2017.

The incremental integration of citizens in sustainable policies

Procurement is a Cycle – monitoring is a core and continuous spoke

The sixth transnational meeting of the Procure network took place in Koszalin, Poland on Tuesday 12th and Wednesday 13th September 2017. The focus of the meeting was upon how cities can monitor the impact of their procurement spend in local economic, social and environmental terms. 

From co-visualising the 'in between' to more integrated policies and actions? Mapping common ground in European social innovation projects

Spin-Off' project that responds to the specific needs of the partners and will be suitable for further development and will be in compliance with the requirements of the respective Transnational/Interregional Programmes and Calls. Spin-off projects are meant to kick-start the implementation of the LAPs.