Representatives from the Jordan municipality of Jerash tell how they have benefited from the exchange with other experts at the events and workshops organised by Connective Cities. They were able to take away many ideas for their own projects in the areas of gender-sensitive local economic development, waste management and plastic recycling, which aim at a zero-waste municipality.
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Public spaces can bring together communities and facilitate cultural expression and diversity, so it is important to look at how public spaces can promote women-city relationship building. Femmedina, a combination of the terms “femmes” (women) and “medina” (historical city), is the name of a project implemented in the historic center of Tunis. The project has the ambition to foster this relationship building.
The Corona pandemic had a great impact on the lives of people in the partner city of Słubice and Frankfurt (Oder). Especially citizens living at the border area were impacted by the restrictions – commuters could no longer pass to the other side of the river for work, families could no longer see each other. Despite all this, it was possible to organise support with great civil society commitment through direct and rapid communication, which underlined the importance of cohesion at the boarders.
Learn how the two cities have worked together to tackle the challenges of the pandemic and successfully strengthened their partnership!”
Watch Video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/k0uCJE_yCac
The pandemic and its associated lockdowns have uncovered an acute need for food security in urban areas. To address this need, Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) in Jordan has embarked on several projects to foster urban gardening in the capital Amman, in coordination with various associations, funding agencies, and the local community.
The world must drastically reduce its CO2 emissions by 2050 to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Globally, we are seeing an influx into cities over the past 30 years and, cities are one of the main spaces where CO2 emissions are directly caused. Emissions in urban areas stem from construction projects, traffic flows, increasing energy consumption from a growing population, production of waste and other factors. “However, the urban space is also the solution space for the climate change,” said one of the participants in the working groups on Green Urban Development. This sentiment was also reflected in a study conducted by the German Advisory Council on Global Change, among other studies carried out globally.
Urban solutions include, for example, the use of new mobility formats such as traffic-calmed urban spaces, roll-out of innovative of e-mobility and bike lane solutions, the reduction of pollution from resource intensive economic sectors, more sustainable building and renovation practices based on circularity, development of urban spaces to promote local economic cycles and community activities and, decentralized energy supply and waste concepts.
The COVID-19 program “Green Urban Development” was implemented in cooperation with the consulting company Mesopartner and the Wuppertal Institute. The program included three working groups, each with 3 to 4 cities and their representatives, mostly partners from local city governments or local research institutions. The objective was to promote the implementation of concrete projects that promote climate neutral city efforts
The three working groups had the following focus areas:
From the formation of the working groups, it became clear that solution approaches often overlap or, that different solutions can approaches create synergies. This also enabled an exchange of experiences between the working groups. The participating cities in the program were Bhuj/Ahmedabad, Belo Horizonte, Kochi, Lalitpur, Dortmund, Buenos Aires, Quito, Montevideo, Hamburg, Kigali, Kisumu and Bremen.
In a first step, project ideas were developed in the respective working group:
In bilateral meetings the topics of interest were explored, and the cities exchange on their experiences.
In a second step of the project, larger network meetings were organized in each working group. Here, the cities in the respective working group exchanged their experiences and presented inspiring implementation approaches. A variety of solution approaches and experience reports were exchanged here, including the creation of a pollution mapping and the e-mobility concept of Kigali, first last mile connectivity approaches in Buenos Aires, the development of the e-mobility hub in Quito, pop-up lanes in Berlin, environmental zones and bike lanes approaches in Belo Horizonte, the development of first bike lanes and app sharing concepts in Lalitpur, etc.
Based on this concrete exchange across the working groups, further bilateral experience exchange meetings were initiated to further develop initial ideas of prototypes. The prototypes included:
Based on these prototypes, concrete project proposals were developed with the objective to start fund raising for the implementation of the initiatives. In the Urban Space working group, Bhuj will implement the project “Safe access to schools for children through child-friendly and traffic-calmed zones.” The mobility-urban space-energy working group developed a project for Belo Horizonte, the establishment of an urban ecology laboratory. The exchanges in the Mobility Working Group eventually led to the project “Applied Technology for Loading and Unloading Public Zones in Buenos Aires”.
In addition to the internal network exchange in the working groups, other stakeholders from cities around the world were involved in the reflection process for new climate-neutral city solutions. For this purpose, two large “Green City Pioneer of Change” workshops were organized, where in each of them more than 50 international participants were presented. The events had the objective to share good practices as well as to reflect jointly on key success factors and challenges.
A variety of input speeches, video presentations, presentations, workshop results and good practices can be found on the Connective Cities website from various documented events:
Connective Cities Lab- Expert Input
with Climate City Expert Prof. Oliver Lah (Wuppertal Institut), 11. November 2021: https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/968
Participation of the three working groups in Design Thinking Workshops (15-17.11 2021):
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/959
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/960
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/961
Working group meeting with exchange of good practices in the working group „Mobility“
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/1102
Working group meeting with exchange of good practices in the working group Urban Space, Mobility, Energy (03.12.21)
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/1095
First large Green City Pioneers of Change Event (19.01.2022)
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/1111
Second Green City Pioneers of Change Event (25.02.22)
To realize the positive intersection of feminism and the 15-minute city, concrete and inclusive land-use and mobility policies are necessary.
In many cases, a lack of clear social policies and guardrails to ensure the accessibility and maintenance of social and rental housing, allow for meaningful mixed-use zoning, and provision of well-integrated and diverse transportation networks, such investments have often resulted in gentrification, often pushing out those who would benefit most from a walkable, cyclable community. This is particularly true for women living alone, single mothers, and those from marginalized communities. Therefore, in order for there to be a positive intersection between feminism and the 15-minute city concept, a truly inclusive and equitable approach, coupled with concrete policies, needs to be adopted.
Representatives of the Hebron Municipality talk about how they have benefited from the exchange with other experts at the events and workshops organised by Connective Cities. They were able to take away many ideas for their own projects in the field of gender-responsive digitalisation of administrative processes and in the field of energy efficiency and improve their implementation.
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To address environmental challenges related to the loss of native species as well as the increasing CO2 emissions due to urbanisation, Karak municipality in Jordan constructed a nursery that aims at growing trees from native species. Besides demonstrating environmental protection and the transition into renewable energy sources, the project will have an economic impact resulting from the savings in the municipal budget as well as job creation for the local community.
Waste management experts from the Ecuadorian capital Quito and Hamburg (Germany) designed a first pilot composting plant for organic waste. It intends to serve the city of Quito as an introduction to sustainable waste recycling.
As cycling is becoming increasingly popular for leisure and as an alternative to using the car, municipalities have to adapt their cycling infrastructure. However, they should not forget to involve their citizens in the planning process.
