As, more and more people are living in cities, adopting sustainable urbanization approaches becomes essential for creating healthy and prosperous urban environments. To learn more and contribute on this topic, two representatives from the BID-REX project attended the thematic workshop "Developing healthy and prosperous urban eco-systems" that took place in Brussels on 26 November 2019. A total of 37 participants from the H2020 and ESPON projects together with officials from the European Commission took part in this workshop to discuss challenges and opportunities for boosting social, economic and environmental benefits of developing urban and peri-urban ecosystems.
The workshop entailed presentations showing how challenges in different regions have been addressed and active discussions in small groups of participants to uncover the main challenges to be addresses at the urban level.
Political commitment for long-term strategies that are integrated with planning and across different municipalities, has been identified by the participants as essential for the success of sustainable urban development. A set of issues, such as evaluation, monitoring, data collection, knowledge exchange etc., were identified as important to be considered in current and future funding programmes on this theme.
The healthy and sustainable urban environment theme, is actionable within the more general EU framework addressing the importance of green infrastructure and urban challenges and there is a wide range of funding mechanisms available for urban ecosystems.
To find out more about the outcomes of this workshop and initiatives on healthy and prosperous urban ecosystems please follow this link https://www.interregeurope.eu/urbanecosystems/conclusions/
