On 26 October 2022, the Directors-General on Urban Matters (DGUM) have met in the beautiful city of Prague as part of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union. During this meeting the members have approved the composition of two new Urban Agenda for the EU (UAEU) Partnerships: The Partnership on Sustainable Tourism (ST)and The Partnership on Greening Cities (GC).

Congratulations to the new Partnership members and ”Thank you!” to all supporters of the UAEU, who expressed interest in this call.

Overall, independent experts have evaluated more than 164 applications equally distributed between the two topics. The representatives of the Czech Presidency,  the representatives of the European Commission and the evaluators have been positively impressed by the considerable interest expressed in the Call for Partners and the quality of the applications received.

The ST Partnership has 29 partners,  including the Municipality of Genoa (Italy) and Municipality of Galați (Romania) as co-coordinators. The GC Partnership has 30 partners and includes Nuovo Circondario Imolese (Italy) and Ministry of Development Public Works and Administration (Romania) as co-coordinators. Click their dedicated page to view all their members. Here for ST Partnership and here for GC Partnership.

The ST Partnership will focus on the specific issues related to tourism in cities as a crucial component of sustainable development urban economies. It will be based on a working definition of sustainable tourism (following the recital 27 of the Regulation (EU) 2021/1058 on the European Regional Development Fund and on the Cohesion Fund.) The Partnership also aims to use a method of collaborative, “co-creation” process, followed by a “co-implementation” phase, as described in the Transition Pathway for Tourism.

The GC Partnership will focus on green and blue infrastructure in an urban context and will create extensive links to other priority sectors, namely the built environment, sustainable transport, water management and urban agriculture. Additionally, it will reflect on biodiversity preservation and adaptation to climate change. The Partnership would be aligned with the objectives of cities to provide higher well-being to citizens through cleaner air, better inclusiveness, and more aesthetic environment.

More information about the state of play of these two topics, announced under the Ljubljana Agreement, can be found in the two Ex-Ante Assessments reports (here for ST and here for GC) conducted in early 2022.

For the next 3 years, the two new Partnerships will work together aiming to co-design and co-implement practical actions. Following a first preparatory work conducted by the coordinators, a full start of the Partnership work is foreseen for early 2023.

The Partnerships are encouraged to build their actions on the research, outputs, outcomes, and results of the previous 14 Partnerships previously implemented and to create synergies where possible, between them.

An opportunity to interact with the Partnership members and find out more about their intentions is expected with the occasion of the upcoming Cities Forum, scheduled to take place on 16 and 17 of March 2023.

Starting from autumn 2022, the new Secretariat of the UAEU will be provided by the Permanent Secretariat of the European Urban Initiative (EUI). To stay in touch with the work of the UAEU and its Partnerships, we invite you to opt-in for the EUI newsletter. We invite you to also have a look at its new website.