Dialogue among the SEE Cities
The workshop, which was held in June 2012 at Polis University, Tirana, with the facilitation of Co-PLAN, hosted representatives from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Federation of BiH and Republic of Srpska), Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Among the participants were delegates from the local government associations, the 29 partner cities/municipalities represented mainly by urban planners, local and regional experts, delegates from central government agencies and institutions from some of the participating countries etc.
One of the main goals of the workshop was to engage participating urban planners in forward looking and constructive discussion of urban planning related issues that hold municipalities back from accelerating local economic development and curtailing massive illegal construction in the region. Given that it was the first workshop in the series, its purpose was also to sharpen ideas on potential subjects for the next workshop in this series. The workshop was designed and delivered in a highly participatory manner. Each of the six sessions started from a stage-setting presentation by regional or international experts and then had an ample time for facilitated discussion.
It turned out that this interactive format of the event worked extremely well and allowed to achieve two very important results. First, participants’ comments and suggestions validated and detailed main findings presented in expert presentations. Second, some participants moved further and formulated a number of fundamental ideas, which even if not offer specific solutions to existing problems, at least help sharpen further discourse.
The C2C dialogue program includes a number of series of thematic workshops and actions between the workshops in each series. The key partners are the partner cities, the local government associations and NALAS, their umbrella organization.