German Association For Housing, Urban And Spatial Development

On EU level the German Association was thus strongly committed to the Community Initiative URBAN, which also strived to promote more integrated ways of urban development for the revitalisation of urban districts with problems. Many URBAN measures and projects were directly addressing SMEs – especially small and micro businesses, start-ups and self-employment – as those play an important role for a favourable socioeconomic development of deprived urban areas. Together with the German URBAN cities of Leipzig and Gera and the Austrian City of Vienna, the German Association built up a European URBAN city network under the URBACT I programme dedicated to local economic development policies and in particular the issue of access to finance via specific financial, but also non-financial instruments: ECO-FIN-NET.

The German Association will use its formal and informal networks for dissemination and sensitisation for putting SME support in the centre of discussion. The general aim is discussion and reflection on SME support policies and instruments on national and European level based on the experiences and results of the FIN-URB-ACT activities.