Future Cities of South East Europe
2021 – 2022
The cities in south-eastern Europe face many challenges such as air pollution, poor infrastructure, inefficient public service delivery, emigration, and diminishing trust in public institutions. All these are linked together in reinforcing negative patterns that make it even harder to solve the causes and impacts of climate change. At the same time, this is a region of amazing potential.
Through the Future Cities of South East Europe initiative, in 2021/22 the cities of Maribor, Sarajevo, Križevci, Niš and our city, Skopje were working to deliver on a mission to make these cities into some of the best possible places in Europe to live, work and visit by 2025. Through this initiative, we will harness this potential and we will try to find a solution to the challenges. We will demonstrate to our region and the world that it is possible to do what is needed for our communities.
the challenge
The cities in south-eastern Europe face many challenges such as air pollution, poor infrastructure, inefficient public service delivery, emigration, and diminishing trust in public institutions. All these are linked together in reinforcing negative patterns that make it even harder to solve for the causes and impacts of climate change. At the same time, this is a region of amazing potential.
Through this initiative, we will harness this potential and we will try to find a solution to the challenges. We will demonstrate to our region and the world that it is possible to do what is needed for our communities.
GOAL
Bring air quality in our cities to within World Health Organization recommended limits by 2023
Achieve circular and net-zero greenhouse gas emission economies by 2030
Ensure that by 2025 all members of our community have equitable access to the fundamentals of wellbeing
Reduce year on year the impacts of heat and flooding on our communities
Approach
Finding a way to achieve our mission is going to require our communities to (re)learn how to work together toward critical shared outcomes as this need goes well beyond traditional political dynamics and relationships towards a more holistic approach with new models of governance; experiment with different forms of collaboration and build different working relationships and structures across our communities; and work on identification of different financial models and instruments to support the work needed.
Plan and results for 2021/2022
2021
- Establish formal organizational structure to provide the YES team with a sustainable model for expansion, capital generation and more decision-making power
- Capacity building of the new cohort of people in the YES team to ensure successful delivery of the mission, from system and design thinking processes, system mapping and Investment in Local Governments to Urban development and Circular economy.
- Develop a guide for design of project portfolio and prioritization based on the learnings from 2020
- Finalize the model for Local Government Impact (green) Investment developed in 2020 with the City of Skopje after its testing during the portfolio development process, and initiate discussion in regard to its adoption by other municipalities
- Initiate the development of new models for financing strategic and transformative projects
- Further develop 2-3 actions from the portfolio of projects with the highest potential for implementation in the next period, by finalizing their Project Information Forms and working to attract capital for implementation
- Work to promote the Economic case for decarbonization of Skopje developed by Material Economics in 2020 to initiate discussion about opportunities for investments in green and circular measures
- Moreover, make efforts to increase the number of open data sets from public/private organizations for more transparency, trust building and initiation of new experiments
- Promote achievements locally and regionally and promote the new YES team structure as a enabler of system transformation in Skopje
2022
With the successful establishment of the new entity – Foundation “Skopje Development Institute”, co-funded by the City of Skopje and the National University, the goal of institutionalization of the work of the YES team has been completed.
As such, the work in 2022 was much more focused on:
- Actively promoting the Impact Investment portfolio of Skopje to attract potential investors, donors and partners through bilateral meetings and events.
- Designing a service offer for local governments in relation to the process conveyed in 2020/21 for development and prioritization of impact investment portfolio for the City of Skopje.
- Designing and developing one pilot model / financial instrument for supporting the transition to RES
- Developing 2-3 actions proposal from the portfolio of projects with the highest potential for implementation in 2022-24
- Digital transformation, mapping and publishing open data sets from the City of Skopje to activate the discussions for utilization of the data for city development and boost entrepreneurship.
In this year, the YES team continues to work on the digitalization of municipal services related to the promotion of sustainable urban mobility and green adaptation by implementing small pilots in the other municipalities in Skopje. In this way, the team was able to gather insight on how to further develop and scale the offer for local governments.
This project is co-funded by EIT Climate-KIC.
JOIN US IN THIS TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEY
We invite other organizations to collaborate, experiment and to co-create with us the needed new ways of supporting cities on a long-term urban transformation journey.
Get in touch with us
Project coordinator: Milosh Sokolikj, [email protected]