It seems we are ready to sum up and discuss the crucial activities of FosterREG – the European project whose main goal is implicit in the project’s full name: Fostering public capacity to plan, finance and manage integrated urban regeneration for sustainable energy uptake. The project has been introduced briefly in our last op-ed.
The main objective of FosterREG was accomplished by running training workshops at national and European level for public stakeholders who had a chance to develop and share their knowledge and skills on carrying out urban regeneration with particular focus on energy-efficient solutions.
Meetings took place in Croatia, The Netherlands and Spain – FosterREG member countries – between July 2016 and May 2017.
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A set of workshops was preceded by a careful identification of the general legal and financial conditions as well as difficulties encountered when trying to employ integrated and successful urban regenerations for sustainable energy uptake.
After in-depth research and analyses, FosterREG partners of three national clusters from Croatia, The Netherlands and Spain formed a collaboration with national, regional and local stakeholders, and prepared joint solutions and strategies to overcome identified barriers associated with regulatory, managerial, financial and awareness issues.
In terms of urban regeneration, a need for integrated actions of public authorities on different levels was emphasised, as the lack of appropriate coordination in regeneration policies was the main rationale for FosterREG.
As a result of several successful workshops, participants to the meetings were handed detailed and comprehensive reports on the situation in a given country and containing proposed strategies to overcome existing obstacles. Elaboration of those important reports is also a big success of FosterREG.
The perspective was mainly national – Croatian, Dutch and Spanish – however a general workshop on the European level was also organised in order to refer to general conclusions and strategies that can be exploited in the whole EU. About five hundred public stakeholders took part in the national training activities which gives an optimistic outlook for better future urban regenerations focused on sustainable energy uptake.
A comprehensive character of FosterREG workshops can be seen inter alia from the fact that one of the meetings was totally dedicated to social workers who were trained on the appropriate ways of informing residents on energy-efficient issues.
A full discussion on the project results will be held during the final project conference on 11 May in Zagreb, Croatia, as a part of Zagreb Energy Week. Live streaming be available at the FosterREG project website.
There is no need to register to watch the streaming. However, in order to gain the full access to the event streaming (including chat) each recipient is required to type in the browser the full address of the project website: www.fosterreg.eu/index.php/final-conference In order to log in to the chat, users must sign into YouTube using their Google Accounts.