Solin interviews Barcelona Metropolitan Area about the local action plan. 

How often do you meet with your Local Action Group? Are you satisfied with their involvement?

BMA team is preparing for the first LAG kick-off meeting.

Joan Caba: "Our Sub>urban Local Action Plan (LAP) is located in Badia del Vallès, a municipality of the Area Metropolitana de Barcelona (AMB). Our Local Action Group (LAG) kick-off meeting will be in October. The preparation is very challenging for two reasons:

1. to involve two administrations - the local political parties and many relevant stakeholders -  and convince them to work together is not easy;
2. to understand and integrate/coordinate all the plans that the different actors are implementing in the city.

The result, so far, is promising.

In order to make the LAP drafting process agile, the idea is to divide the LAG in the LAGcore and the LAGexpanded. The LAGcore would be in charge to codesign and codraft the LAP. The group would be composed of  technicians of both administrations, external technics and local stakeholders. They would meet once a month. On the other hand, the role of the LAGexpanded would be to propose the main inputs, support and validate the process. This group would be composed of the LAGcore members plus members of all the political parties and strategic stakeholders. They would meet every three/four months."

If you got inspired by the BMA approach and want to ask more, do not hesitate to contact Joan Caba. Coming up next to ask the question is Oslo.

by Edmund Futo, Baia Mare

By photographer Haidu Tamás. He is a very good street photographer from Baia Mare, who captures the reality of the district.

We decided to approach the process of the local action plan by creating the concept of 'smart district'. We will do this together with our Urbact Local Group. Questions we need to address are:

• How will we re-create the green spaces that are parasitized with different garage accomodations?
• How will we control the transformation and quality of ground floor spaces from residential to commercial spaces?
• How will we transform the character of public space from an unattractive into a smart space ?

We foresee the following three steps:

1. Creating teams together with experts, active citizens, NGOs, ....
2. Investigate and identify different areas who generate the smart district 
3. For every designed space, we want to include a social-economic-educative dimension of urban development.

Marijana from Solin made a life scale model at the Urbact Summer University.

Although the Urbact Summer University seems already weeks ago, it still lingers on in our network. For those of you who could not join, we interviewed Isabelle Verhaert, lead partner from sub>urban, on how she experienced the USU.

Which policy lab did you follow and what did you learn?
I followed the policy lab “liveable neighbourhoods” with lab manager Nils Scheffler. Nils is the lead expert of the network “2nd change”. This network is focussing on the transformation of large vacant buildings, and it is closely related to our theme. The lead partner is Naples and we are looking together with Casoria how we can exchange experience and knowledge across our networks.

I was asked by the URBACT secretariat to facilitate a local group, so I learned a lot about the preparation of the facilitators for such an event. I also learned from the dynamics in my group, with a lot of people from a very different background. The most interesting discussion for me was that there was disagreement on the definition of a qualitative house in different European contexts, but there was no disagreement on the definition of a qualitative neighbourhood.  My favourite methodology we used, is definitely OPERA (Own suggestions, Pair suggestions, Explanation, Ranking, Arranging). Although we used it in tropical circumstances in the Fenix Food Factory.

What's up on your local level? Via our What's app group sub>urban partners were sending in pictures from their first kick-off meeting with the local groups. It is great to see how techniques and methodologies from transnational meetings and the Urbact Summer University are immediately tested on a local level.

Brno implemented the knowledge and tools from the Urbact Summer University in their own city.

A key stakeholder meeting in Vienna, with a short introduction via video conferencing with Lead Exper Maarten Van Tuijl.

Solin connects with local citizens during the Kick-off meeting.

Oslo welcomes stakeholders at the kick-off meeting.