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Ready for the future? Urban resilience in practice

Urban resilience is the capacity of urban systems, communities, individuals, organisations and businesses to recover, maintain their function and thrive in the aftermath of a shock or a stress, regardless of its impact, frequency or magnitude.

When a human or ecological system loses its resilience, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to disturbances that previously could be absorbed. For example, the same amount of rain will have different impact on neighboring cities, if one of them decided to build over green spaces, with no regard for water retention and absorption capacities. 

Undertaking spend analysis and developing procurement strategy

If cities are to progress the way in which they undertake procurement so that it brings more local economic, social and environmental benefits, they need to go through a number of steps. As part of the Procure network, we have already completed two of those steps. The baseline study enabled our partner cities to identify the activities they were already doing around procurement and importantly to identify key challenges they faced. Our first transnational meeting in Lublin, Poland effectively set the legal context for more progressive procurement through exploring European and National Level law.

A short discussion note on Community Cohesion

The theme of the First Workshop in Dresden 21-23 September 2016

The issue of community cohesion has becoming increasing more pressing and as such has pushed the issue higher up the political agenda following the tragic events in Paris and Brussels. The  ongoing state of emergency in Paris and  Brussels, the ongoing arrival of migrants fleeing war and poverty and the recent  attacks  in Nice, Normandy and  in several German  cities have brought to the fore the ongoing challenges facing cities in respect of managing the new flows as well as addressing the issue of community cohesion.

Roadmap to a better Social Media Governance

How Social Media can help the collaboration between Public Administration and Citizens

"There is a lot of power in people to self-organise around a specific issue and if they'd like to use technology to mobilise themselves, they should have the capability and the choice to do that.”
Juliana Rotich, founder of Ushahidi, 2011
Interactive Cities explores how digital, social media and user-generated content can improve today’s urban management in European cities of various sizes.

How Eindhoven unlocks the collaborative capacity of the city through social service delivery

It is clear why Dutch cities have a good reputation recently among urbanists. In the beginning of the year we heard that four Dutch cities, Tilburg, Utrecht, Groningen and Wageningen, from January, 2016 are giving some of their social assistance receivers an unconditional social security payment (i.e. a monthly income of the Government without an obligation to take paid employment or to be involved in community service). They examine whether these people will become more active than others with the current, strict regime. In May, urban planners appreciated the signature of the Pact of Amsterdam paving the way for an EU level urban agenda. Last but not least, the URBACT community is hopefully already checking on the internet why the URBACT Summer University 2016 is taking place in Rotterdam, in the city which received the Urbanism Award in 2015. To carry on with ground-breaking urban experiments from the Netherlands, this article is about the WeEindhoven social experimenting programme, which might have had less publicity, but it is definitely worth following the results of this pioneering initiative.  

Cities talking Digital

Have a listen to URBACT’s first ever podcast which explores what we mean when we talk about digital jobs in Europe’s cities and what cities from all URBACT networks – whatever their core theme - could and should be doing to maximise benefits from the Digital Economy.