The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and the Directorate General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO have announced an open call for applications for the 2024 territorial peer review on integrated development strategies in non-urban areas (i.e. ITI, CLLD or other type of territorial tools) of the 2021-2027 programming period. The main […]
Towards innovative, inclusive and creative hubs in European cities
Three Horizon 2020 projects, CENTRINNO, HUB-IN and T-FACTOR, have released a policy report titled ‘Towards innovative, inclusive and creative hubs in European cities’. The report builds on the operational experience of the three projects in 23 pilot areas across the EU and aims to provide guidance in the implementation of heritage-driven urban regeneration approaches by […]
CENTRINNO’s Focus Group series: the Fab City Hubs workshop
The grand finale of the CENTRINNO project’s Focus Group series, the Fab City Hubs workshop took place online on 23 November 2023. Over the past months, the focus groups engaged in insightful discussions on key topics such as Social Inclusion, Circularity, and Vocational Training. This last Focus Group on Fab City Hubs encapsulated the essence […]
SPIRE Baia Mare – Start-Ups Mentoring Programme – Applications
The SPIRE STARTUPS mentoring program is an activity of Smart Post-Industrial Regenerative Ecosystem – SPIRE project supported by Urban Innovative Actions program (UIA – Urban Innovative Actions). The purpose of this project is to experiment, test and implement creative, innovative, visioning, sustainable development solutions for sustainable land use, nature-based solutions. SPIRE proposes a revolutionary approach […]
LDnet: a community of experts building bridges between research and practice
Local development is multi-faceted with practitioners split between the urban and rural domains, while researchers come from different academic disciplines. A community of experts dealing with local development could help harvest lessons learnt and overcome silo mentality. LDnet and the European Commission are very keen on building bridges between research and practice and on making […]
Towards a Promising Season for Local Development – Notes from Porto’s URBACT CityLab and CITIES Forum
The upcoming new season of Cohesion Policy looks to be a promising one for local development; at least for what emerged during Porto’s URBACT CityLab and CITIES Forum (29-31 January 2020). The CityLab and the Forum touched upon key topics for the future of local development, including: the objectives and priorities of the Commission for […]
A lively debate on ‘Capitalising on diversity in local development’ at EWRC2019
On 9 October 2019, as part of EWRC2019, LDnet, organised a workshop in partnership with ELARD on ‘Capitalising on diversity in local development’ under the theme ‘A Europe Closer to Citizen’. The workshop aimed at demonstrating that bottom-up approaches to local development, like CLLD, have succeeded in engaging ‘Unusual Suspects’; people left out of mainstream […]
Overcoming EU Discontent in ‘Places That Don’t Matter’ through Community-Led Local Development
The past year has certainly been a particularly difficult one for the strength and cohesion of the European Union. The outcomes of local and national elections in many countries unveiled not only the emergence of new populist and nationalist movements and governments all across the Union, but also a growing disbelief in the European project […]