11th European Week of the Regions and Cities

 

07 - 10 October 2013. Brussels, Belgium

+INFO: http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/conferences/od2013/theme.cfm

 

Marking the new timeline towards the Europe 2020 strategy, the OPEN DAYS 2013 will be held under the slogan 'Europe's regions and cities taking off for 2020'. Workshops will address one of the following themes:

  1. Managing change 2014-2020: Workshops will present and discuss innovative approaches to the implementation of the 2014-2020 thematic priorities. Practitioners, academics and EU institutions and regional experts would share their experience on the new elements in the implementation of the 2014-2020 programmes (e.g. integrated territorial investment, the joint action plans, governance issues, features of the new performance framework, financial instruments, simplified cost options., etc.).

  2. Synergies and cooperation: Identifying how to cooperate, coordinate and ensure synergies between different EU and national and regional policies and sources of funding will be the discussed here. This includes synergies between cohesion policy objectives. Approaches to cooperation such as the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation and macro-regional strategies could also be presented, as well as examples of sound cooperation between national, regional and city administrations and expert institutions.

  3. Challenges and solutions: Every European region and city is facing challenges that it finds hard to deal with on its own. But solutions to improve people's quality of life exist throughout Europe and elsewhere. They can be shared and perhaps adapted to different regional and urban contexts. Workshops will aim at presenting practical solutions to common regional and urban challenges, e.g.: SMEs' access to credit and to the global markets, youth unemployment, demographic challenges, waste, water and natural risks management, congestion, pollution or high energy consumption.