For over 10 years, I have been working on European collaborative projects across the public, private and voluntary sectors. Although predominantly focused on economic and community development, particularly with small and medium sized enterprises, the range of specific activities has been quite wide ranging. This includes business support, entrepreneurship (virtual and ‘bricks & mortar’), social innovation and inclusion. My professional experiences, combined with my educational background – I have a Master’s degree in Economic Development and Local Authorities Cooperation in Europe and a Post Graduate Certificate in Programme Evaluation - have given me a sound understanding of the challenges facing urban communities in different geographies and socio-economic contexts. The heart of sustainable urban development is to ensure that communities, large or small, can integrate their local values, needs and requirements with the greater political, economic and environmental constraints. The problems facing our cities are growing more complex and while the solutions are many and varied, community collaboration and participation is essential to ensure that the approaches taken are truly sustainable and not just creating further problems in the future.

From my experience of working in international and partnership organisation, I gained a good understanding of how transnational exchange and learning can provide tremendous opportunities for reflection and development of new approaches to common challenges. Whether that is declining neighbourhoods, unemployment and vulnerable communities or air pollution, the problems are universal, but many solutions are local. Through the sharing of approaches, concepts and solutions, not only can local policy-making be improved, but individual capacity and ability is also enhanced. One of the key challenges however is reconciling the different perspectives and capacities with individual or community capability. The institutional and historical background of less developed regions of Europe is considerably different to more developed regions. Transnational learning processes, such as URBACT, need to recognise that and identify the best approaches to maximise the respective strengths. As the coordinator of the London’s ULSG for URBACT Markets, I had the opportunity to attend the ULSG national training days and to apply the URBACT methods and tools, through the different stages of setting up the ULSG - from informing the members on what a ULSG does and how, through to building their participative capacity to sharing knowledge and adopting new practices, thus making of the most of the transnational opportunities.