URBACT III Launch, 16 March 2015

URBACT III will celebrate its official launch in Brussels on the 16th of March 2015.  Our colleagues from Brussels Office will be attending an event organised by the European Commission which gives us a good reason to look into URBACT at glance:

URBACT’s mission is to enable cities to work together and develop integrated solutions to common urban challenges, by networking, learning from one another’s experiences, drawing lessons and identifying good practices to improve urban policies.
Following the success of the URBACT I and II programmes, URBACT III (2014-2020) has been developed to continue to promote sustainable integrated urban development and contribute to the delivery of the Europe 2020 strategy.

URBACT III programme will be organised around four main objectives:

  1. Capacity for Policy Delivery: To improve the capacity of cities to manage sustainable urban policies and practices in an integrated and participative way.
  2. Policy Design: To improve the design of sustainable urban policies and practices in cities.
  3. Policy Implementation: To improve the implementation of integrated and sustainable urban strategies and actions in cities.
  4. Building and Sharing Knowledge: To ensure that practitioners and decision makers at all levels have access to knowledge and share know-how on all aspects of sustainable urban development in order to improve urban development policies.

To reach these objectives, URBACT III will develop three types of interventions:

  • transnational exchange,
  • capacity-building,
  • capitalisation & dissemination.

Each of these interventions will be build upon the strengths developed in URBACT II.

URBACT uses resources and know-how to strengthen the capacity of cities to deliver integrated urban strategy and actions on the thematic according to their challenges. The main target participants include practitioners, city managers, elected representatives and stakeholders from other public agencies, the private sector and civil society.

The total budget eligible budget of URBACT III is 96,3 M€.