How cities go from funding to innovative financing? Valladolid city, mentor in PROSPECT, sharing experience at EUROCITIES annual conference.
In your city, municipality, you have so many projects you need to implement and finding the resources is not always easy. H2020 PROSPECT is bringing together experts from cities, municipalities and regions in a peer to peer, in order to learn from each other. The mentor, such as Valladolid have implemented city projects with the use of innovative financing.
At the largest annual event of EUROCITIES which took place in the Czech capital, Prague, and gathered about 400 urban experts, 87 politicians from 30 countries; Valladolid’s example was inspiring other cities to share experience.
Valladolid had achieved a lot on the field of smart cities, and they transformed their transport thanks to their innovative way of working with stakeholders, contracting and financing.
There are several ways of getting funded for city projects from European budget (research funds or other subsidies), but this is often just small percentage of what is needed. Cities need to look for other financial sources and multiplicators. Cities need to assess what is needed, set priorities but also know which way of financing can be best option for them.
Jesus Gomez Perez, manager from Valladolid, shared his experience about how to combine different ways of funding and financing for mobility. Furthermore, Bernadett Degrendele facilitator in the project and smart cities project coordinator at EUROCITIES explained how in a peer to peer learning program (PROSPECT H2020) they worked with each other to enable also other municipalities and regions to learn from their example.
The event focussed on ‘cities at a crossroads’, reflected on the new political landscape at EU level, as well as the changing landscapes in our own cities.
The speed networking session with PROSPECT has been visited by many city experts: Zaragoza, Oulu, Reykjavik, Mannheim, Karlstad, Lille and Hamburg.
All cities who attended the session agreed that more needs to be done and learning programs, concrete support needs to be given to cities, so solutions are found to the very demanding environment of developing new projects and give quality services for the citizens.
Countries attended the conference are from:
Austria, Belgium, Bosnia&Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Esonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Turkey and the United Kingdom.