The first meeting of our CityZen partnership took place on 12-13 Sept 2019 in the city of Sofia (Bulgaria). CityZen is a project that aims to promote urban farming to policy makers as a new driver for economic and social change in five European regions. As we can see in our regions, farming in cities provides many opportunities for better resource efficiency and well-being for citizens - shorter food miles, less processing, storage and packaging, while adding value to local products and urban sites. During the next months, we are going to explore and share our experiences on how local policies can scale up urban farming into productive business and revitalization models for the regions.
Our Kick-off started by an introduction round of all partners, who presented their regions and specific policy instruments coming from Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Germany. There was room to highlight some key issues for improving the policy settings and discuss and agree on common grounds for our learning activities, communication, management and monitoring of the project.
The next meeting will take place in Frankfurt, Germany, in March 2020 and we will keep you posted on any further CityZen updates!
