Within the project the Dutch design offices Generation.Energy and PosadMaxwan hosted expert workshops to share their experiences on integrated urban planning with all committed- and forerunner cities, as well as to support their represenatatives with solving most pending challenges with further development of the specific city districts or areas. Both organisations have large experience in the topic, as they encourage sustainability through integrated planning in many of their projects implemented on the regional, local and district level, thus they could share useful inputs allowing participating cities to look at their problems from different angles, think of possible solutions and of who to involve in their implementation.
The workshops were organised on-line, in two rounds, for each project country separately to address specific frameworks, that the cities work in and enable interaction and co-creation of solutions among the participants. Who had to come in prepared and do a small homework before! Each city defined the key local challenge that it wanted to discuss (e.g. lack of green & blue infrastructure in the city centre, intensive car traffic, limited intermodality, increasing number of inhabitants and the necessity to create new, energy efficient residential areas with access to basic services, etc.), illustrated it on a city map and discussed. Then it was time for all the participants – including the Dutch experts – to think of different possible solutions, both small and large scale, centrally-driven or individually-driven. Now it was time for the Dutch partners to do the homework and two prepare two alternative scenarios presenting possible integrated solutions to the problem for further discussion. During the 2 nd workshop, the scenarios were presented together with some examples of relevant case studies from Dutch cities and districts. The participants also discussed together who are the most relevant stakeholders to consult and involve in their implementation, as well as what would be the potential impacts of the measures taken. At the end of the workshops everyone came out with a pool of ideas how to achieve sustainable development goals to further digest!