CITIES OF TOMORROW, ACTION TODAY

URBACT ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2012:

CITIES OF TOMORROW, ACTION TODAY

Last December 2012 the URBACT ANNUAL CONFERENCE was held in Copenhagen, and we were there. We couldn’t miss the opportunity to witness the event where the future of our cities would be discussed. URBACT is a European exchange and learning programme promoting sustainable urban development. This European programme is part of Europe’s cohesion policy: its goal is to help implement the Lisbon-Gothenburg Strategy, which prioritizes competitiveness, growth and employment. Under the slogan CITIES OF TOMORROW, ACTION TODAY, Urbact brought together people from all over Europe, as well as from faraway spots around the world, so as to work together to develop solutions for major urban challenges. It was conceived not only as a communication and dissemination event, but also as a capitalisation pretext, where networks were sparked and the programmes could present and share their results. Urbact is aware of the moment cities and their citizens are going through, which is why they are promoting urban practitioners, policy-makers and experts to come together to work on policy challenges and co-create new solutions for cities. “We enable CITIES to work together to develop solutions to major urban challenges, reaffirming the key role they play in facing increasingly complex societal changes. We help cites to develop pragmatic SOLUTIONS that are new and sustainable, and that integrate economic, social and environmental dimensions. We enable cities to SHARE good practices and lessons learned with all professionals involved in urban policy throughout Europe. “

We could summarize URBACT goals in 4 different but linked points: - Coordinating exchanges so as to promote significance and opportunities for the cities - Analysing and obtaining outputs from the learning process. - Issuing programme results and conclusions. - Networking programme funding URBACT comprises 500 cities, 29 countries and 7,000 active participants. It is jointly financed by the European Union (European Regional Development Fund) and the Member States. The Annual Conference was an excellent occasion to learn and discuss, taking into account very different points of view. A huge number of professionals were brought together to talk about the challenges, visions and ways forward for the cities of tomorrow, and as the slogan said, all this comes through acting today. The arguments usually allowed for a common framework, where the highlighted points were: demographic challenges, social polarisation, inclusive prisma and capitalization. A substantial part of the debate was focussed on the new role that urban policies should adopt, not merely as a funding mechanism, in order to become a catalyst process able to move government to governance. And an outstanding outcome learned there was: “It’s not about having more money to do more things; it’s only about doing the right ones” Countless concepts were brought out, but I would like to stand out highlight some of them here. Multilevel Governance together with bottom-up processes were presented as goals to achieve in our not far future cities of the near future. In a discussion of territory planning, the engaging idea of planning through empathy was proposed. Moreover, the issue of time was taken into consideration, and in unison with planning, it was shown that planning is essential in order to build a more resilient city, not only in an urbanistic way, but also in an urban way. The message being, cities have to plan now, not later, their potential economic sector. Besides, in order to motivate the need for change in policy management some essential actions were suggested, such as empowering people, piloting programmes, building organisations of trust and monitoring processes so as to learn from the experience itself. The trial and error method was introduced as a platform for social innovation; also proposed was the idea of opening some spaces as situation laboratories, in order to discover unexpected practices. Finally, the principle of trust featured in several discussions, bearing in mind that trust is about cohesion, and a bet for it providing shared spaces for the generation of ideas.

The development of the conference was interesting. They were able to coordinate very different activities so as to maintain interest throughout the event. Talks, workshops, world cafes, informal and delicious lunches, a boat trip, thematic day visits and also an icebreaking dinner provided a fantastic atmosphere to exchange our own ideas, know-how and doubts around the cities we live in daily, not only as experts. Personally, I had a very enjoyable experience, from which I learned a lot of things and gave me an idea of the attitude the administrations have for the cities of today and of tomorrow. Although, in the same way, I must admit that the huge presence of administration agents went against the diversity of attendants, and took away intensity from some of the discussions. I would like to end this report summarising the conference with a fascinating statement that came up these days which said: “We need a culture of change, and it will happen through informal cooperation”