Latest News

It's New Year's Eve and the best possible time to make conclusions of 2018 and look forward to 2019. Mr. Björn Grönholm, Head of Secretariat of the Sustainable Cities Commission, shared these thoughts in the last Sustainable Cities Bulletin regarding the passed year and future plans.

The CIVITAS SUMPs-Up project offers a series of free e-courses to anyone interested in learning more about sustainable urban mobility planning.

The cities.multimodal project looks back on a busy first year. The partner cities conducted a comprehensive preparatory analysis incl. interviews with stakeholders, collected statistical data on their pilot area and implemented a survey among their citizens in order to get to know the mobility situation and behavior in their cities. The outcomes are now published as fact sheets on our website– take a look!

Solar boats on the river Ryck – makes electric mobility on water coming alive for inhabitants and guests of the city. This year Greifswald took a new approach with the traditional sailing festival because they had a tradional sailer (climate sailing tour) in Greifswald with young people dealing with climate questions on board.

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.