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URBACT, another paradigm for European cities

Edited on

24 June 2019
Read time: 1 minute

“Rebuilding a trusted relationship between local stakeholders and citizens is essential and requires the elected representatives and administrators of cities to reinvent their role.”

A feature article about URBACT, the cooperation programme for European cities, has been published in the magazine Urbanisme.

The article gives a clear outline of the integrated urban development approach that URBACT promotes, and highlights new models being used to improve our cities.

There are examples from Amersfoort (Netherlands), part of a “sustainable food for cities” network, and Genoa (Italy), which leads the “Interactive cities” project investigating how digital, social media and user-generated content can improve urban governance.

The authors – URBACT’s Emmanuel Moulin and Eddy Adams – show how the programme has built up an EU-wide community of several thousand practitioners over 15 years, becoming: “a vehicle for the transformation of practices in Europe's cities, constituting a true exercise of local democracy”.

Read the article in English. It was originally published in French, in the magazine Urbanisme, issue n° 404 (Spring 2017).