On 11 April 2018, UBC Urban Planning webinar was arranged as a possibility for our cities to learn more about what we do as an organization as well as what kind of projects and activities we have to offer to the Baltic Sea Region. The webinar gathered 14-16 attendees from Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Finland, mostly from the urban planning field.
The webinar started with an overview of the webinar’s agenda and an introduction of Union of the Baltic Cities Sustainable Cities Commission to those who were not familiar with our city network by our Communications and Network Manager Jutta Mäkinen.
Project Coordinator Maija Rusanen gave a presentation about the Baltic Urban Lab project includes four brownfield pilot sites from Riga (Latvia), Tallinn (Estonia), Turku (Finland) and Norrköping (Sweden). The overarching aim of the project is to improve sustainable urban planning practices regarding the brownfield areas in the respective countries and to combine innovative and traditional tools in urban planning in order to enhance public-private-people partnerships in local urban planning context. As a result, the integrated planning and partnership model for brownfield development will be created.
The Smart Sustainable Skanssi project from City of Turku was presented by Project Coordinator Ann-Sofi Österberg. The area is currently being developed under 10 Smart Sustainable Skanssi themes that include a smart built environment, environmentally friendly transport solutions, smart regional energy solutions and much more. Co-developing methods have been utilized in the project, bringing stakeholders together in the forms of the sparring group, a co-developing forum and events.
Webinar’s special guest speaker, CDP Cities Manager Shirin Reuvers inspiringly talked us through CDP disclosure processes and how urban planners could benefit from utilizing the environmental data. Shirin also gave a presentation on how CDP cooperates with its partner organizations, including UBC, and the changes that have been made to the 2018 Cities Questionnaire.
Our final presenter was Project Coordinator Agnieszka Ilola presenting the iWater – Integrated Storm Water Management project. iWater aims to improve urban and storm water planning processes, create higher quality and more resilient urban space, decrease future costs of urban flooding and thus increase the overall urban sustainability. The project has been awarded EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region’s HA Climate Flagship Status. The project has many outputs for our cities to take into use including Integrated Storm Water Management Guidelines, Green Area Factor tool, multifunctional storm water solutions tested in 7 pilot sites and iWater toolbox. The Final Conference of the project will take place on 7-8 May 2018 in Riga, Latvia. Please contact UBC Sustainable Cities Commission if you would like to participate.
UBC Sustainable Cities Commission had its first webinar on sustainable mobility back in December 2017 where majority of the participants indicated that they would like us to arrange more webinars. Especially concrete good practices from other cities seemed to interest our webinar attendees. As a result, we chose to organize our second webinar on the broader theme of urban planning and to present our projects and some concrete examples alongside with it. Overall, the webinars have been acting as a tool for enhancing the exchange of know-how between our cities and we are planning to continue with the webinars later this year.