ABC project

ABC - Alliance of Baltic Cities is a project run by UBC Commission on Urban Planning and supported by the INTERREG IIIB with 255.957 EUR. This project develops ideas and methods of city planning and development tested at the six common seminars held during 1999-2002.

The project will be run for three years (2003-20050 and engages 27 cities. 15 of those cities belong to the EU and 12 are non EU-countries. The project will engage city planners and architects working in municipalities and local regions. The ABC-project will be targeted at local questions and regionally working colleagues as well. Six joint seminars for some 50 participants have been planned.

Each seminar will include three main issues such as:

• Local circumstances in the host city and country,
• advice on how to solve local city planning problems,
• special common planning items.

The six seminars will be held in Kolding, Vaasa, Liepaja, Viljandi, Gdynia and Malmo. The participants of the ABC-project will visit six countries and six cities of varied size. It will allow obtaining information and discussing the planning legislative system in those countries and following the implementations according to the size of the planning situations.

We can discern three common items to be studied carefully in the project:

• developed urban management,
• cities as regional engines,
• renewal of city districts.

The project will result in

• regular contacts between colleagues,
• six examples/proposals on how to deal with city planning problems of today and tomorrow,
• forming of some "patrols" which can help other cities with planning problems,
• six or more small scale investment proposals.

It is expected that more than one city representative will participate in the project, to get the project going in case one leaves the project. The group of colleagues presently participating in the UBC Commission on Urban Planning has much to learn from each other. Proposals on how to deal with the planning problems of today at our seminars in Gdansk, in Riga and in St. Petersburg have been presented. We will develop this way of working and form "patrols" which will be sent to cities with planning problems. We believe that we as a group of experts have something to offer in such situations, beside the normal consulting agencies used as project experts. Such agencies work mostly with the Project, showing the Wanted Planning Results, Pictures of The New Eldorado or so. We can add basic and useful comments to the Process towards the Results as well. The BSR wants us to state Small Scale Investment Proposals to be financed in a certain order further on. We will try to formulate such proposals for all our six seminar cities, which might be of some interest if they can put forward planning activities of certain value for the host city and its inhabitants.