July
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OECD countries need 15 million extra jobs by 2011
09 Jul 2010According to estimates of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), OECD countries will have to create 15 million jobs by 2011 in order to reduce current unemployment rates. In the past few years, unemployment has increased 50 percent and 70 million people have lost their jobs. The employment situation has become similar to that of 1973, at the time of the oil shock. If countries do not act now, the present unemployment rates could become structural, OECD warns.
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Another milestone for city transport
13 Jul 2010Council conclusions support sustainable and integrated urban mobility. The Transport Council of the EU has unanimously adopted conclusions on the European Commission’s Action Plan on Urban Mobility, published last September 2009. The conclusions represent a milestone for urban transport and an achievement for EUROCITIES work in this area, since the Council has finally acknowledged the importance of the urban dimension in the EU’s transport strategy. The Council’s conclusions reflects the positions on urban mobility developed by the EUROCITIES in the past few years.
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Getting the big picture right
20 Jul 2010People are travelling much further nowadays in their daily lives, for work, shopping and leisure. This means that housing and job markets now operate at a larger scale. Hospitals and higher education institutions also have bigger catchment areas. All this affects the way in which places should be planned and designed.CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, in London England) has spent two years trialling a flexible framework: 'Getting the big picture right', which advises a new approach to large scale urban design, with more working across local authority boundary ‘red lines’ on a map.
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Participate in the EUKN conference poster contest!
22 Jul 2010A call to submit posters for the annual conference of the European Urban Knowledge Network (EUKN) held in Budapest on 13 and 14 September. Cities and civil or professional organisations are invited to submit posters which will be presented during the EUKN conference: “Effects of demographic change on urban structures”.
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Artists – the vanguard of gentrification
23 Jul 2010In virtually every major European city, long-established locals and artists are fighting against the gentrification of their neighbourhoods. But the arty types are falling out of favour, observes the author Tanja Dückers. No longer hailed as the rebellious vanguard, they are actually bent on joining the establishment.
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Results and impact of the URBAN Community Initiative in 2000-2006
26 Jul 2010URBAN II, the Community Initiative for boosting depressed urban areas, has made a positive contribution to tackling the challenges of neighbourhoods in crisis. This was one of the key findings of the evaluation carried out by the European Commission. Between 2000 and 2006, URBAN II enabled converting and renovating 2314,000 m² of buildings, the creation of 3,238,000 m² of
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Evidence on the results of the INTERREG Community Initiative in 2000-2006
27 Jul 2010With around €5.69 billion of funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the INTERREG Community Initiative generated significant results between 2000 and 2006. This is the conclusion reached by the European Commission after finalising the evaluation of INTERREG III, covering the programme's three strands – cross-border, trans-national and inter-regional cooperation – as well as the related ESPON and INTERACT programmes. Key findings show that the added value of INTERREG goes far beyond mutual learning: INTERREG supported around 5 800 business start-ups, created or safeguarded 115 000 jobs and created some 12 000 networks and cooperation structures.