EUKN - European Urban Knowledge Network - PreSud - Peer Review for European Sustainable Urban Development

PreSud - Peer Review for European Sustainable Urban Development

Introduction

Presud is a partnership project that is exploring the contribution that European cities can make to sustainable development.

Description

Over the last decade work has been undertaken at the international, European, national, regional and municipal levels to advance sustainable urban development. However, progress thus far has been largely limited to raising awareness of sustainable development. Such awareness has yet to result in sufficient commitments by the various stakeholders to realise implementation. As a consequence, concrete sustainable development in urban areas has yet to be significantly advanced. In the context of this problem, stakeholders in Europe’s cities require new implementation tools capable of both measuring the quality and effectiveness of exiting policies and prompting them to undertake new policy initiatives.

PreSud is a European LIFE co-funded project that was completed in October 2004. The project is about developing a peer review tool to examine and improve the sustainability performance of Municipalities across Europe.

Participants

University of West of England
Improvement and Development Agency
Eurocities
City of Vienna
City of Venice
City of Birmingham
City of Leipzig
City of Nottingham
City of The Hague
City of Newcastle
City of Malmo
City of Tampere

Network lead

The network is led by the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The city has a long commitment to Sustainable Development and to being involved in European Programmes. It will both co-ordinate the project and act as a participating city by undertaking peer review performance assessments of other cities and preparing a sustainable development action.

Objectives

The PRE-SUD project will address the need for new implementation tools. To this end, the project has four principal objectives:

Adapt the methodology of 'peer review' used by the OECD to review the environmental performance of OECD member states. This will create a new pan-European tool to measure and encourage the implementation of sustainable development in Europe's cities.
Test the 'peer review' tool by undertaking two rounds of performance assessment of the sustainable urban development of the partner cities.
Implement 'specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-limited (SMART) action programmes' in the partner cities arising from the 1st performance assessment. These will achieve improvements in sustainable urban development of between 10% and 25% across all cities. The second performance assessment will assess the cities progress towards its targets.
Demonstrate the usefulness of the peer tool to contribute to good practice of European sustainable urban development.

Products

The project brought forward a peer review tool to examine and improve the sustainability performance of municipalities across Europe. This tool is available on the website and on CD-Rom.

The website/CD-Rom has 3 sections:

Peer Review Training, which takes you through some useful guidance on interviewing and understanding;
Peer Review in Practice, introduces some of the experiences of the partners and some suggestions for best practice;
Peer Review Outputs, offers a number of documents and reports that have been produced as a result of the completed peer reviews.

EU involvement

The project was co-funded by the European Commission’s DG Environment LIFE programme (Project Number: LIFE00 ENV/UK/000891).

Contact info

City of Newcastle-upon-Tyne - Directorate of Enterprise, Environment & Culture
Civic Centre, Barras Bridge
NE1 8PH Newcastle Upon Tyne
Mr Allen Creedy, tel. +44 191 2115633

Links

City of Newcastle-upon-Tyne PreSud PreSud Training site

Document type

network

Themes

Urban Policy > Social inclusion & integration > Community development

Keywords

Capacity building