What's new

Two cities united by a love of good food

As URBACT opens its first call for Transfer Networks here’s a story of how a Good Practice from one city was adapted and transferred to a completely different local context.

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

Cities and digitalisation: “Adapt or die”

How can cities benefit from digitalisation?  With dramatic headlines about jobs being destroyed by digitalisation, and many policy makers resisting change, Alison Partridge argues that the 4th industrial revolution, and industry 4.0, are best seen as an opportunity, not a threat, for Europe's towns and cities.

First, some definitions…

For many this is a complex, unfamiliar and somewhat bewildering landscape. So here are a few explanations of key terms before delving deeper.

Can nature make your city climate-resilient?

Among the headlines of summer 2017: disastrous floods in the South of England, Istanbul and Berlin, extreme water scarcity in Rome, wild fires damaging homes on the Croatian coast, the Côte d'Azur and elsewhere… The magnitude and frequency of these and other events indicate that climate change is already a reality, and the impacts will be even bigger in the future. Yes, we need to reduce greenhouse gases to limit climate change, but equally urgent: we need to adapt to the remaining impacts. All cities, depending on their geographical position, are likely to experience prolonged and more intensive heatwaves or droughts, more frequent wild fires, coastal flooding, or an increase in the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall with the associated threat of urban flooding, river flooding or landslides. How can cities cope with these huge predicted impacts of climate change in the future, even when they are faced with tight budgets? Can nature be a solution?

Malmö enjoys its green infrastructure solutions

Emerging retail and consumer trends that challenge small cities and their centres

Mireia Sanabria, URBACT III RetaiLink network Lead Expert

What follows is a summary of the presentation delivered at the URBACT III City Centre Doctor network transnational meeting held in San Donà di Piave (It), 29-31 May 2017. It introduces the key challenges that small and medium-sized European cities experience with regards to retailing in their city centres as a result of consumer and sector trends. It also points at some methods and policy guidelines for mediumsized cities to approach the topic with an aim of minimising the impact that the new consumption and business models have in their cities.

The growing role of food in fixing our cities

El pasado 7 de enero de 2019 se lanzó oficialmente la nueva convocatoria las URBACT Action Planning Networks, que estará abierta hasta el 17 de abril. Puedes conocer todos los detalles aquí