Kick off meeting in Łódź - Let's start talking about people in the process of revitalization.

The first international meeting of the second phase of the project took place on 21-23 January in Łódź. It was attended by representatives of all partner cities: Łódź, Toulouse, Birmingham, Braga, Baena, Bologna, Zagreb. Everyone in their daily work undertook the extremely difficult challenge of revitalizing urban space.

Because there were many new people among us who will work in the project, we started the meeting with games and integration exercises. During one of them we asked national teams to design a new emblem of their city, taking into account the innovative potential of the city and the direction of its development through the transfer of good practice and ULG work.

The meeting was also attended by a representative of the National URBACT Point in Poland - Aldo Vargas Tetmajer, who introduced us to the Urbact method. A large part of his speech was also focused on a topic important for us, such as the construction and functioning of ULG's.

In the afternoon, Elżbieta Michalska, deputy director of the Revitalization Bureau, and Marta Ignaczak, coordinator of hosts and lighthouse keepers, conducted workshops on the basic elements of regeneration processes in Łódź and familiarized partners with training issues for people involved in the revitalization process. Initially, the basic competencies of mediators were discussed, who also actively participated in this part of the meeting and willingly shared their impressions and experiences from working with the residents of the city in the process of moving. However, this topic, as a key element of the Good Practice of the URM, will be analysed in more detail during the 4th TNM in Łódź, scheduled for September 2019.

Further on, the participants of the meeting, divided into groups, took part in an exercise on urban planning. Teams they had to organize and design a district of the city. Their aim was to work out a compromise on the location of new buildings, roads and green spaces and renovation of old buildings, taking into account social needs and the different functions of public spaces. This workshop aimed to show how many elements need to be taken into account when developing urban policies in order to ensure that there are sufficient the number and quality of dwellings for a given population size.

The day ended with an introduction to and discussion of change management.

The second day was focused on preparing partners to create transfer plans, the lead expert Piotr Wolkowinski and the project coordinator Joanna Brzezińska presented guidelines for transfer plans. They discussed not only the form of Urbact's requirements but also what should be included in its content and what communication tools should be used for its implementation. Later, during interactive workshops, each city group developed a draft transfer plan specifying the key points they would like to include in it.
In the second part of the day we were joined by Aleksandra Hac from the Office of the Press Officer of the Mayor of Łódź, who discussed with the partners the advocacy strategy both with regard to internal units of the office and external stakeholders of city revitalization.