Working for the City of Amsterdam Hettie Politiek and me were invited as stakeholders to the 3rd international meeting of the ABCitiEs Interreg Europe project.
The place to visit was Varazdin in Croatia, in comparison with Amsterdam a relatively small town. It turned out to be a very historic place, being Croatia’s capital for a decade in the past. However, our Croatian colleagues set up interesting program with plenty of site visits, room for discussion and spare time.Due to the fact that the national and local systems are incomparable it made it a little difficult for us to completely understand the cases from other Member States. Therefore the informal conversations with the other stakeholders during our stay were the most valuable part of the trip for Hettie and me.
For the next meeting we suggest to split up in smaller groups in order to share experiences. Preferably those groups are composed of specialists with similar tasks from the represented Member States. Finally, we would like to thank all the representative for their presence and in particular our Croatian friends from Varazdin and Cakovec for putting so much effort in organizing this meeting.
Hettie Politiek – Programmanager Democratization
Mark van Marken – Programmanager ERDF
