Latest News

Climate change impacts cities everywhere. The blazing wildfires, heavy rains that cause large-scale flooding and fluctuating temperatures are some examples of the climate-related risks that need to be anticipated and prepared for in order to reduce their impact on our cities.  As most of the cities of UBC are located in the somewhat close vicinity of the Baltic Sea or a lake/river, the issues regarding sea level rise and flooding are of uttermost importance.

As an essential path toward more integrated, resilient and sustainable urban development, brownfield regeneration (redeveloping underutilized areas of a city) has the potential to both limit the urban sprawl and promote investment to restore the land that has been contaminated by industrial activity.

Baltic Urban Lab project has published a guide – Towards integrated and partnership-based planning of brownfields areas. The guide is targeted to urban planners and other experts interested to learn more how to develop brownfield areas in cooperation with citizens, NGOs, land-owners, developers and other stakeholders.

The BSR WATER platform project has successfully kicked-off in Riga last week! Three-day event involved careful planning of the upcoming years of platform project implementation based on the expertise of partners, focuses of involved projects and indicated aims to achieve through the platform cooperation.

Good news for cities developing Sustainable Urban Mobility plans! CIVITAS SUMPs-Up is looking for up to 25 planning authorities to join the 5th SUMP learning programme (SLP) which starts in May 2019.

The third UBC webinar was held on 25 October 2018 with the focus on presenting the UBC cities the concrete urban planning tools that have been developed in two cross-border cooperation projects - iWater and Baltic Urban Lab.

The annual meeting of the CIVITAS Initiative took place under the slogan “Mobility for U and Me” from 19.-21- of September 2018 un Umeå, Sweden.

We are pleased to introduce to you some new additions to our staff.

Integrated Stormwater Management (iWater) project held its final conference on 7–8 May 2018 in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia. iWater aims at improving urban planning by development of integrated and multifunctional stormwater management, thus creating higher quality, cleaner and safer urban environment and increasing urban sustainability. The event successfully concluded the project that has engaged over 500 stakeholders and produced several tangible outputs.

The “Status of SUMPs in EU Member States” report summarises the status of SUMP and national SUMP programmes in all 28 EU Member States and elaborates recommendations for countries interested in developing their national programmes. Find the report here: sumps-up.eu/reports 

Are you a mobility practitioner, working in a city administration, a NGO, company or at a research institution? Are you interested in sustainable urban mobility planning or already experienced with SUMPs?

During the past weeks and months, we have received good news: three new projects will start! One will be led by UBC SCC, in the two others we are involved as a partner.