The power of art and culture … and how to fund it
So I want to begin with an apology. I apologise in advance for writing another one of those articles that uses COVID as an excuse to talk about something the author thinks is important. In my case: art, culture, and wellbeing. I’m going to use this article as a soapbox, giving a few examples and […]
New ways to create more green areas in cities
… via Integrated Urban Green Space management Today’s cities are heavily populated and densely built-up. Improving the quality of life of citizens by providing them with green spaces is therefore really challenging for municipalities that anyway have limited resources. So we give it a go and explore smart governance approaches addressing this challenge, through the […]
Fighting elderly isolation with active ageing
Isolation has been a challenge for the elderly generations in the last decades, but it has been more than ever relevant as the covid pandemic puts them in quarantine from their families for the sake of their health. Initiatives fighting the isolation and promoting healthy ageing are a priority in reforming our social services, to […]
Building identity and tourism in the 21st century
… via Community-sourced Cultural Heritage Valorization The folklore of Saint Martin is part of our pan-European cultural heritage. It is about much more than churches and relics: his pilgrimage across the continent lives through legends carrying unexploited potential for community-building and tourism as well. The NewPilgrimAge project proposes a possible way of making the best […]
VISION UP – BURST MAGAZINE IS COMING
Cities are to be the forums where solutions to major current and future challenges are born, as they are living labs for policy, innovation, creativity and progress – this was the main conclusion of the CITIES Forum in Jan 2020, organised by the European Commission, Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy and the City of […]
From the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy to Urban Greening Plans
How the EU is Legislating for Nature Restoration in Cities? In the last couple of years, increased attention has been paid to environmental challenges in the European Union’s agenda. Part of this is an increased focus on biodiversity and related issues, such as nature restoration. For example, the European Green Deal aims to utilise natural […]
Breaking the glass ceiling: NBS water retention is becoming a horizontal principle IN policies
Unexpected and dramatic precipitation events become everyday struggles as the effects of climate change can be felt more and more on our skin. Managing the response to this phenomenon requires multilevel and interdisciplinary effort from cities, regions, countries and transnational systems likewise. In this broad horizon, we investigated the coordination role of municipalities with regards […]
From Living Labs to Societally Conscious Manufacturing: The Case of Eindhoven
This month, we talked to Wim de Kinderen, who works for the Brussels Office of Brainport Eindhoven. This interview will cover a lot from living labs to mixing technical and social innovation, from regenerating a region through triple-helix economic initiatives to 3D printing. However, there is an underlying theme here: how economic development can be […]
Available, applicable and easily spreadable good practices for bee-friendly cities
We already talked about monitoring the environment with bees, but on a more general level, the presence of bees is an indicator for an area’s well-being and inevitable for biological diversity. In frames of the BeePathNet URBACT project in 2018-2021, the XIIth district of Budapest has been working on becoming a bee-friendly district with several […]
Green Transformation, Community Led: The European Commission on the New European Bauhaus
Readers of the BURST Magazine may be familiar with the New European Bauhaus initiative, as we already covered it in July last year. However, this time, we managed to ask Alicja Herbowska, Acting Head of Unit for the NEB at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission for an interview. The interview will explain […]