Member Article

Manchester secures ?300k European urban development funding

Manchester has secured €300,000 to finance regeneration projects from a funding pot shared between nine European cities.

The City Council won a share of €700,000 made available for the City Sustainable Investment in Europe (CSI Europe) network from the European Union’s URBACT initiative – which is financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

The funding will be put towards an exchange programme that will link the European partner cities to help them share best practice in financing urban development.

CSI Europe is expected to pool the experience and expertise of each partner city to develop regeneration programmes with advice on innovation and sustainable financing.

Sir Richard Leese, Manchester City Council leader, commented: “This network of prominent European cities has the opportunity to learn and share innovation that will help inform their own management and financing of future regeneration projects – which is vital in these turbulent economic times to ensure development can continue unhindered.

“Manchester has a worthy reputation in large regeneration projects and is therefore well placed to lead this network – especially in view of our investment model and leading role in the Evergreen fund in the North West.”

The Council said it has worked over the past six months to expand the network from five to ten cities who have already visited Manchester to see how it manages urban development, with ongoing projects such as Citylabs, the Soapworks site and its Evergreen investment programme.

Partner cities include Ancona, Leipzig, Lille Métropole, Malmö in Sweden, Porto in Portugal, Poznañ in Poland, Riga in Latvia, Seville and The Hague.

The project will run until April 2015, and Manchester’s funding will support hosting talks and conferences held for the partner cities.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Miranda Dobson .