What happens in Malmö will definitely not stay in Malmö. This year’s URBACT Summer University was a return to working in person and a continuation of URBACT’s commitment to shaping the future of European cities through collaborative learning, innovative urban projects and fun!
URBACT is an EU funding program that supports peer learning between cities. Over the course of almost three years, city administrators from all over Europe learn together about self-defined topics. To make this happen, and to help these cities implement the URBACT method, they choose a lead expert from the URBACT pool of experts. That’s my role for the URBACT Action Planning Network FEMACT-Cities.
To kick this all off, URBACT hosted the URBACT Summer University in Malmö from 28 – 30 August. The Summer University is the flagship kick-off event for the action planning process. This time around, it attracted 400 participants from 252 cities. It was great to be part of it all. I left feeling inspired and ready to get started! And – as always – the URBACT team outdid themselves with the venue. <3
In three exciting and full days, we worked together on the action planning process, met potential cooperation partners from other networks, and visited inspiring case studies.
I was thrilled to be featured in Day 2’s video recap, which showed some takes from our case study visit. We were looking at inclusive city development, both from a gender and a child- and youth-oriented perspective. Thank you to our hosts for showing us such inspiring and invigorating examples. I know I for one wish I could copy paste them all to my own local context!
And now the fun (and hard work) begins! Over the next weeks and months I will be visiting the eight partner cities to meet their local stakeholders, help them define their policy challenges, and start to pave a path forward. It will be a busy period. I can’t wait to share it with you all!
For more Info also visit the URBACT Recap of the Summer University
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