Urban-net - URBAN-NET Stakeholder Workshop 2

URBAN-NET Stakeholder Workshop 2

"Future research areas on Urban Sustainability in Europe "

Sprachschule, Berlin, 10 & 11 June 2008

The second URBAN-NET Stakeholder Workshop was recently held in Berlin. The workshop was attended by 60 experts. The purpose of the workshop was to develop research priorities on four pre-selected key themes;

Urban sprawl or compact city - integrated re-use of land
Integrated urban management through multi-sector/-actor governance
Climate change and ecological risk management
Health, quality of life and public spaces.

The workshop was a great success and work is now underway to consolidate the outputs from the sessions and to progress these themes further to develop a European strategic urban research framework which will be used to engage the project partners and other European regional and national research funding organisations to become involved in transnational research programmes.

The event was aimed at organisations funding research programmes, policy makers and practitioners from URBAN-NET partner and non-partner countries, as well as the URBAN-NET partner organisations. The partcipating experts were nominated by the URBAN-NET partners and were selected for their knowledge of the pre-selected policy and research areas listed above. The experts were selected from the following to ensure that URBAN-NET operates in an open and inclusive manner;

Local/regional political or administrative decision makers
Researchers, from research institutes and universities
Networkers, multipliers, urban networks, professional umbrella associations and NGO's
Research and programme managers from URBAN-NET partner countries

The overall aim of the workshop was to structure prioritised thematic urban development areas and formulate realted research questions and ideas for future research at a European level. The key tasks were to;

structure each priority research area and further deepen the knowledge in a thematic group
reflect trends and state-of-the-art on priority research areas
agree on future needs for best practice development
derive research themes as well as research questions
formulate concrete recommendations for URBAN-NET's future actions in research cooperation
give advice as to how trans-disciplinary research can be facilitated

Day one included presentations on the ambitions of the URBAN-NET project and interim results obtained since the project started in 2006. There was also a presentation on the development of the framework for future research. This background information, together with the papers distributed before the workshop, equipped the participants well for the subsequent work in the 4 parallel thematic sessions.

In 4 working groups, the participants were asked to discuss, cluster and find answers to the following questions;

Session A - Appraisal of sustainability in urban Europe

What are the core problems and challenges in the given thematic area?

Session B - Visions for sustainable cities

What are the preferred visions for the future?
What are current development and policy trends, good practices and state-of-the-art of research in Europe?

Session C - Making the vision happen

In which fields do you see a need for additional activities?
What kind of policy measures are missing?

The day ended with a plenary session to present the interim findings and discuss them with the full group.

Day two, following on from the development and policy issues discussed on day one, proceeded to look at research issues. In a final parallel session the following questions were put to all 4 working groups;

Session D - How can research facilitate urban sustainability?

What are the knowledge gaps in the identified action fields and what are the relevant research questions?
What are your recommendations for future research at a European level and what concrete actions can be taken (by URBAN-NET or other)?
How can the implemenation of research results be improved?

The workshop was rounded off with a final plenary session.

The full programme for Stakeholder Workshop 2, copies of the presentations given and the conference report (Proceedings of Stakeholder Workshop 3) are below.