ABC PROJECT FOR UBC CITIES

Our program for the next years

Our ambitions for the future works in our UBC Commission are to continue and develop the co-operation for city/town planners and architects in cities and towns in the BSR region. Therefore we create a network for exchange of knowledge and experience, having professional preparation groups for our "burning" questions and going on arranging common seminars, two per year. We will try to get resources through an application to Interreg III B.

After fulfilling the project, we hope that we are able to formulate common strategies for the development of our cities. We also hope that our UBC Commission will get a world-wide reputation - at least in the BSR -of being a serious and clever partner to co-operate with when solving local and regional problems.

Our application to Interreg III B

Our project is named "ABC – Alliance of Baltic Cities" - A City network cooperation for Local approaches to Regional Strategies. In our developed program we refer to the 3^rd and 5^th strategic objectives given in the Interreg III B program. We base our application on our previous work during more than two years, four seminars and our experiences. We stress the strong connections existing between regional and local planning.

We propose a common project for three years with 30 cities joining the project, 15 EU-cities and 15 non EU-cities. We count with seven common seminars, four held in non EU-cities, and three in EU-cities. Each seminar will last for three days. Half of the time at each seminar to be used on common issues, half time to be used on issues stated by the Host City. We will create three preparation groups, which shall meet once between each seminar. Each preparation group consists of five cities from both EU-cities and non EUcities. Every preparation group shall prepare and lead two of the seminars and document them afterwards. Our certain topics for the three preparation groups will be:

• Visions and future for our cities,
  
• Cities and regional development, and
  
• Urban Challenges

Expected results

We expect that we will succeed "Bridging over the Baltic Ocean", i. e. learning from all sides. We also believe that we get stabile individual contacts to build on for the future. We will present six broad examples on how to solve local planning problems – both separately presented and all together in a final report. We will make it possible to continue with our work of colleagues and make them "consultants" to any city within the UBC.

We have calculated the need of financial support from Interreg III B to a little more than 100.000 Euro per year over three years. Adequate financial support must also be applied for to Phare/Tacis for the 15 non EU-cities participating.