In cooperation with the City of Bonn, Connective Cities has organised a dialogue event with the topic ‘Inclusive cities: urban and social development for all’. From 7 to 9 May 2018, 48 municipal actors from Germany, Bolivia, Ecuador, Ghana, the Palestinian Territories, Ukraine, Moldova and South Africa gathered to present good practices in inclusive urban development and to develop new project ideas. These are intended to serve the goal of giving all people equal access to all spheres of life, and the event resulted in a number of concrete project ideas, such as the design of an inclusive exhibition that allows non-disabled people to experience physical impairments.
Due to the increasingly important role of local government associations (LGAs) as representatives of city interests, Connective Cities brought together 25 experts from eleven LGAs in Germany, Ghana, Lebanon, Moldova, Mozambique, Peru, Serbia, South Africa and Tanzania from 9 to 11 July 2018 to exchange their practical experiences. Among other things, local challenges were identified and solutions were found in detailed discussions. The participants also had the opportunity to engage in dialogue with Andreas Wolter, Deputy Mayor of the City of Cologne, and received a tour with the topic ‘Kommunale Selbstverwaltung’.
From 3 to 6 September 2018, Connective Cities organised an study tour for representatives of nine Jordanian municipalities as part of the ‘Municipal know-how for host communities in the Middle East’ programme, in which the Jordanian delegation experienced good practice examples on the topic of ‘integrated district development and green infrastructure’ in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate and deepened their knowledge on this topic. In the subsequent workshop in Krefeld, the participants developed their own project ideas in an exchange with German practitioners and formed promising potential project partnerships with the participating German municipalities.
A delegation of 13 Lebanese municipal representatives also travelled to Germany from 25 to 28 September 2018 to participate in a study tour and a project workshop in Hamm. This event was the second of three events in cooperation with the ‘Municipal Know-how for host communities in the Middle East' programme, which dealt with the topic of ‘local economic development’. Accordingly, the participants visited several business development agencies in North Rhine-Westphalia and gained insights into successful German concepts of marketing regional products and local tourism promotion, and developed concepts like the marketing of regional olive oil to create workplaces.
The third event on the topic of municipal waste management took place on 10 and 11 October 2018. 23 German and Turkish municipal actors took part in the practitioners’ workshop in Cologne and visited the AWB Cologne depot and the RheinEnergie biogas plant and then developed their own concepts for projects in order to implement them in project partnerships. These projects, like the others in the series, are further supported by the ‘Municipal Know-how for host communities in the Middle East' programme.
From the 23rd to 25th October 2018, the international community of practice Connective Cities invited municipal practitioners to Nuremberg, Germany, for a dialogue event entitled ‘Strategies for a Digital City – Challenges and opportunities’. There, participants from 11 municipalities in France, Germany, the Palestinian Territories, Taiwan, Turkey and Ukraine exchanged their experiences, plans and difficulties in proactively shaping their municipal services with regard to digitisation trends. To support their exchange, the participants listened to presentations from specialists and visited the Nuremberg Transport Company (VAG), further reflecting and discussing in working groups. Over the course of the event, the participants obtained concrete proposals for their digitisation strategies and projects on topics related to digital urban mobility.
