Kickoff Meeting at Paços de Ferreira

Present were also Melody Houk, Capitalization Manager at the URBACT Programme Secretariat in Paris, and Miguel, the Lead expert appointed to the project. The Lead Partner opened the meeting also to the Local Support Group and to elected representatives.

The meeting, held at City Hall of Paços de Ferreira, was formally opened by the Mayor of Paços de Ferreira, Mr Pedro Oliveira Pinto, in a speech where the relevance of the project for the city of Paços de Ferreira was stressed, and highlighted the importance of urban revitalization to bring more competitiveness, jobs and education to the region.
Next, Melody Houk from the Urbact Secretariat, presented the expectations from the programme towards the Wood FootPrint project, and the broad lines that must be complied by all URBACT projects. She particularly highlighted the vertical approach of the project to wood cities and reinforce the need of the project maintain this identity. Also, she focus on the need to maintain a focused approach in order to achieve concrete and tangible results that can be useful not only for the cities involved in this project, but for other cities across Europe too.
The following presentation has been made by Lead Partner, represented by Mr. Duarte Sousa, the project Coordinator, who presented the main objectives for the Wood FootPrint project as presented in the application. Duarte Sousa made an overview of the project, explaining the context and the challenges, linking to the project activities and main foreseen outcomes. He also stressed the strong commitment from the city of Paços de Ferreira to make this project a success and the focus on wood sector supply chain but with a major emphasis on what is now the major concern of most cities in Europe, which is the creation of jobs, in order to successfully reduce unemployment.
Mr. Rui Coutinho, the Communication Officer, made a presentation about the Paços de Ferreira urban strategy for the next years. The presentation covers aspects of city thinking at European, national and regional level. Rui presented the link between the already defined strategy for the city and the challenges and goals defined for Wood FootPrint project. He stressed the importance of the project for the refinement of city thinking in the horizon of 2014-2020 and the alignment with the fore coming structural and European incentives for urban regeneration.
After coffee break, the Lead Expert Mr. Miguel Sousa, provided a general overview of what can cities expect – and what is expected from them – over the full cycle of an Urbact project. Miguel Sousa reinforced the need to correctly and quickly focus the “urban problem” addressed by the project as this will influence the baseline study which will be the starting point for all project implementation activities. He also highlighted the tangible results that are expected by the project at the end, besides the Local Action Plans, which should consist of feasible and fundable actions that can contribute to solve (or minimize) the urban problem identified; Mr. Rui Coutinho, the Communication Officer, made an introduction to Paços de Ferreira Local Support Group (LSG) stressing the relevance and role of the group during project implementation. The Paços Ferreira LSG covers organizations from industry, education and business associations. The Lead Partner selected to be the leader of the Paços e Ferreira LSG is PFR INVEST, which is an urban management municipal company (http://www.pfrinvest.pt/). The Lead Partner invited 2 organizations, one from local academy (Polytechnic of Oporto - www.ipp.pt) and the other one from business sector (Paços de Ferreira Business Association http://www.aepf.pt) to make a presentation.
In the end of the morning and before the lunch, Rui Countinho de Communication Manager organize a Press conference with local and national press in order to disseminate the project for the Wood FootPrint community. The Mayor, Lead Expert, Urbact representative and Communication officer were available for question during 45 minutes.
In the afternoon, the session was closed to cities partners and LSG members. It started with presentations of the 2 cities present at the meeting, with a focus on strong and weak points as regards the general topic of the project. Synergy and complementarities between partners have been evident and should now be reinforced by additional city partners that can add balance and value to this project.
The Lead Expert, Mr. Miguel Sousa, made a presentation about the main issues addressed in the Paris Training Session organized by Urbact Secretariat and about financial aspects.
The Lead Partner, Mr. Duarte Sousa, presented the budget revised by accordingly to Urbact Secretariat suggestion during negotiation phase. The use of mixed model management raised some doubts that were promptly solved by Urbact Secretariat. After coffee break it was time for the planned working sessions.

Working Session 1: Plan of activities (coordinated by Lead Partner and Lead expert):
- Goals and contents of Baseline Study- information to collect: the discussion was around the structure of the baseline study and the information that needs to be collected during the next months. The importance of focusing the project around a limited number of problems, in order to keep the project manageable and feasible, has been agreed by all partners. After discussion it has been decided to focus the project on wood cities and sector and open sub-topics to:
- Jobs creation;
- Find incentives to move urban industry to industrial parks
- Find solutions for empty urban buildings (industry and showrooms) and avoid others to become vacant;
- Develop tools for the animation and increase attractiveness of Business Parks;
- Work local Skills, in particular for unemployed workers.
- Expansion of network / new partners - Expansion of the partnership: while the Wood FootPrint partnership is now made of 5 cities for the initial development phase of 6 months, according to the rules of URBACT it must be extended to include between 8 and 12 cities for the following implementation phase of 27 months, starting in February 2013, keeping a balance between cities located in Competitiveness and Convergence regions of Europe. Following the approval of Wood FootPrint by the URBACT programme, and the announcement of this in the URBACT site, several manifestations of interest from cities all around Europe to join the partnership have been received by the Lead Partner and Lead Expert. The partners reviewed these applications and selected a first group of cities from where the new city partners will finally be selected, taking in consideration aspects as country and region of origin, commitment to social responsibility matters and similarities with the current partners.

Cities from the north and Central Europe have preference in order to have a better geographical European coverage.
- Plan the visits to the cities – the Lead Partner decided that the first cities to be visited should be the cities that didn’t participated in the kick-off-meeting. The Lead Expert will start the arrangements to reach an agreement for a date within the first 2 weeks of July. The partners decided that the second and final meeting of the development phase should take place in beginning of October in Wycombe. This meeting should already be participated also by the new partners and will lead the project towards the final application for the Implementation Phase. Also the partners discussed and agreed on an initial calendar of visits to the cities by the Lead Expert, a visit that will serve both to gather information for the baseline study and to set up and organize the initial meeting of the Local Support Group in each city.

Working Session 2: Implementation, covering:
- Communication strategy – the Communication officer made a presentation about the mini website and project logo. Also, it were discussed the main communication rules that should be followed by the entire partnership.
Finally, the municipality of Paços de Ferreira offered a dinner to the participants.

The second day was fully dedicated for a visit to Paços de Ferreira under the theme “The problems and solutions in implementation”. The day started with a visit to furniture SME. This company with 50 employees is a good example of an industry that moved from urban areas to the Paços Ferreira industrial park.
Then, a 45 minutes road view was made to the furniture show-rooms which are abandoned or partial vacant. During the road view Mr. Rui Coutinho highlighted the problems raised by these buildings to the urban footprint of the city.
The morning ends with a visit to Swedwood, the IKEA factory in Paços de Ferreira. The visit started with the company presentation and then a premises visit.
After lunch, the Lead Partner team and Lead Expert remained available for bilateral meetings with the partners for issues linked with financial aspects, network enlargement and communication.