Our Urbact Local Group in Toruń – fails and chances

After our first meeting people who wanted to dedicate their time to project Gen Y City stayed with us. We decided together how often we want to meet. Standard project rules recommend 7 meetings during 2,5 years, but we decided we need more. That’s why one time in a month we make our conference.  Place of meetings are also important, that’s why we meet in different localizations. Members of LGU presents their specialization and surroundings and thanks to it whole group can better understand their skills and point of view. Until now we met in municipality, in the NRD club and at garden city belonging to one’s member. Duration of the meetings is also flexible. Sometimes we have such intensive discussion that only hunger can send us back home. Brainstorming procure creativity and hopefully will improve the city.

We also run group at Facebook. It’s a perfect place to share articles about Generation Y, tidbits about technology as well as creative industries. We also talk to dissipate misdoubts concerning definitions.  All needed materials, rations of duty everybody can find at our group. It really helps. Even deputy of mayor of our city follows us.

At the beginning of our work we found out that some of the popular things existing in other cities don’t occure here, in Toruń. For example we contacted with travelers from couchsurfing platform and found out that we don’t have Free Walking Tour offer in our city. We thought that students from departments of the local university could make it. We already prepared it and even found the money for realization. We want to start it and later give back this activity to the hands of young people.

Looking for concepts and problems we also found that bazaar trade limited starts up concerning food tracks. We know that Generation Y needs specific places into down town to settle down. Food tracks are popular among young people and also highlight old town as a modern public space.

We organize events and surveys to get to know Generations Y personally and to ask them what they need. Of course we still remember that our dominant aim is building and sharing the idea of creative enterprises. We also make structure connecting municipality and university for closer cooperation. On January we are going to start Urbact Year at University Nicolaus Copernicus and we are planning to published Dictionary of Modern City Spaces. This will be  a book for clerks and students made by scientist from local university. We also want to share with young people idea of social consultations to show them that they have possibility to change city as they want.

We want to function using two ways:

1. Experimental  - organizing events, consulting, encouraging activist
2. Collecting good practice and solutions to our Integrated Local Plan.

Well, at least it was like this until we didn’t take a part in Urbact Summer University in Rotterdam. It was milestone for all of us. When we were practicing construction of city policy for imaginary Avalon we understood that our activity should be completely different.

New methods like: tree problem, mapping actors or opera showed us how we really should  start to work together in balanced way. We all have tendency to jump into solutions without thoughtful diagnose of problems. We need to design, describe problem at first and then explore reasons and effects. We are lucky that we have just started our project and still have time to do it right way. Instead of finding solutions we need to use methods to help us build ULG potential and also as an effect, Integrated Action Plan.