On Wednesday 26th May 2021, the IURC Asia & Australasia project team collaborated with IURC colleagues in China and Brussels to organise a webinar to provide information for European cities willing to cooperate with Asian and Australasian cities within the IURC programme.
The event highlighted how diverse and dynamic the Asian and Australasian regions are, as represented by the team members who are specifically responsible for project implementation in different countries.
First, Ronald Hall, Senior Adviser to the Directorate General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission, provided an overview of the EU Commission’s urban policy priorities and possibilities for EU cities through the IURC programme. He referred to previous experiences under the IUC project.
Pablo Gándara, Team Leader of the IURC Asia & Australasia, provided an overview of the project, including the list of countries and number of cities to be involved, the quadruple helix approach that aims to engage national authorities, businesses, civil society and academia in the project, the thematic networks as well as the approach for implementation of the thematic clusters and city pairings.
This overview was followed by a series of presentations on country information by the many team members, including Panagiotis Karamanos for India, Hidefumi Imura and Yatsuka Kataoka for Japan, Bruce Wilson for Australia and New Zealand, Megan Chow from CITYNET for the Republic of Korea and Jacqueline Change for Malaysia. Pablo Gándara also referred to the country information available in the IURC website for Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam (see www.iurc.eu/australasia).
Qian Wang and Jingnan Jin from the IURC China team presented the cooperation approach specific to their project while Sandra Marin Herbert, Team Leader of IURC Central Coordination Service based in Brussels, answered questions regarding the application process.
In total, 51 participants joined the information session with representatives from 19 European cities.
All presentations of the session as well as the video introduction are available here.