Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona

Between 12 and 14 June, the AMB took part in the halfway conference of the project URBACT, Urban Challenges: Fringe Solutions. This programme, with the help of financing from the ERDF, seeks to achieve more sustainable and comprehensively planned cities.

The AMB took in the conference, which was held in Brussels, as a member of the network Sub>urban Reinventing the fringe, which also includes other cities and metropolitan areas all over Europe, such as Antwerp, Düsseldorf, Vienna, Baia Mare, Casoria and Brno.

In addition to monitoring the progress of the project and defining the next steps, the members of the various networks of municipalities involved in the major URBACT project, such as Eurocities, had the opportunity to make contact with each other at the meeting in Brussels, which led to a great deal of exchanges of ideas, proposals and success stories.

One of the requirements for joining this European project is to have defined a participatory Local Action Plan, with an urban development project that can be exported to other regions. In the case of the AMB, this plan was ‘Imagina Badia', a project implemented in the municipality of Badia del Vallès, which aims to collectively define the priority projects to be undertaken in the coming years in order to transform the town and improve its inhabitants' quality of life.