Sustainable and Integrated Urban Development means to integrate all actors involved in a City, to make them co-create and become all together responsible for the management of the City, which means coordinating all policies and making citizens the centre of City Policies. It is to converge all that is in our hands to achieve the smart, sustainable, inclusive society and to create the path to meet Europe 2020 Strategy. Urban demographic evolution in previous decades has made issues like quality of life, wealth, growth, jobs, public services and city management crucial to most of the national, regional and local governments. Moreover there is an open discussion about recentralization or decentralization of public services management. All cities are being asked to become more efficient, the costs of the city and urban integrated regeneration are going to be key issues in the future. But the city is not only a physical matter but a social, economic and environmental tissue where the most important challenge is to involve knowledge and capacities of civil stakeholders in the new modes of governance, such as PPPP (Public, Private People Partnership) and bottom-up processes. Therefore, we must keep on studying how public Policies affect and develop to be a city booster for citizen’s life quality and its sustainability. For this purpose URBACT Programs for Cities are the most suitable programs to tackle the requested paradigm change, Sustainable and Integrated Urban Development.

The reason experience sharing is not only capacity building, but to foster a deep change in our urban culture and policies. To achieve this goal, we need to share the best practices among us (representatives, citizens, officers and practitioners) on real basis and URBACT methods and tools provide this kind of learning processes. My European project experience has been really intense over the last years, both at a project level and local level. At project level, strengthening partner’s capacity to develop a participative framework on the EU key urban topics and at local level, involving all relevant stakeholders to provide support on tools and methods required to implement and successfully run their ULSG and co-produce the best possible LAP. For this reason, we need now to reshape our networking activities, both to activate and to improve the partners results and at the same time to match with a multi disciplinary and multi cultural environment (differences, language and cultural, legal-economic and social frameworks, etc.). This objective can only be achieved with a new perspective, with a change of paradigm which I am willing to address. Because we need to think how can we make the transnational activities the best learning opportunity for all kind of urban stakeholders and agents; and how to tackle the real problems of our cities.