On Thursday, 21 September 2017, the 2nd Czech National Workshop of the ATTRACTIVE DANUBE project took place at the European House in Prague, Czech Republic. This project, co-funded by the ERDF and IPA funds, is aimed at promoting the attractiveness of the Danube region for its permanent residents and visitors, entrepreneurs or investors. The workshop was organized by CENIA, the Czech Environmental Information Agency, one of the project consortium partners.

Second Czech National Workshop

The national workshops within the ATTRACTIVE DANUBE project are a meeting point for the subjects involved in spatial planning, territorial attractiveness, regional development, of course in its sustainable form, and the monitoring and evaluation of the above mentioned. One of the outputs of the project, to be achieved in 2018, is a territorial attractiveness monitoring platform (TAMP), platform of indicators for monitoring the attractiveness of the area, (one joint platform, for all countries participating in the project, and one national, in this case with indicators specific to the Czech Republic). 22 indicators common to the project have already been defined, national platform indicators are to be discussed at these national workshops.

At the 1st National Workshop, selected indicators used to evaluate different areas of development were presented. Subsequent discussions and working during the breakout session, resulted in the creation of concrete proposals, as to which indicators (of the ones already used), best characterize the attractiveness of the territory and should be used at national and regional level. You can find the workshop report here.

During the summer months, the project team evaluated the list of indicators proposed during the 1st National Workshop and also began to find out which indicators could really be used. Whether the indicators are available as such, whether sufficient time series are available, or whether data is available to prepare them. A list of possible, "applicable" indicators was discussed at the 2nd National Workshop. As in the case of the 1st workshop, representatives of various organizations of state administration, regions, academia and companies met. The discussion this time focused not only on potentially suitable indicators of attractiveness but above all on the real possibilities of obtaining data for the evaluation of the proposed indicators. The list of proposed indicators itself was also discussed, especially with regard to the coverage of all important areas of the region's development (e.g. tourism, housing, transport accessibility, environmental status, etc.).

Supporting Danube Capitalization Strategy another project of thematic pole 11, representatives of project AgriGo4Cities were invited to the workshop too. The presentation on the creation of community gardens, linked its topic with the ATTRACTIVE DANUBE project and is also financed by the European funds ERDF, IPA.  This was a very pleasant entry into the debate on territories. In the AgriGo4Cities project, which works in a similar way as the ATTRACTIVE DANUBE project, the community links one topic and a set of recommendations on how to approach the issue in the future. Are community gardens/allotments one of the indicators of territorial attractiveness of the area? Come and take part in our 3rd National Workshop, where we will introduce the indicators as part of the national platform test version, and again we will be happy for your views and comments.

Second Czech National Workshop

You will be informed about the date of the workshop in due time.
 

Presentations are available here.