Dordrecht unites forces with Belgians and Britons
Today, the Taskforce Water City of the Municipality of Dordrecht hosts a workshop on finding solutions for climate change in the city. Participants are fellow civil servants and advisors from the Belgian cities Antwerp and Ghent, and Bradford in the UK. These cities have an intensified collaboration with Dordrecht within the European BEGIN project.
City-to-city learning
Climate change increasingly confronts cities with extreme weather conditions: heavy rainfall, flooding and heat stress in the summer. Dordrecht, Antwerp, Ghent and Bradford soon came to the conclusion that they have quite an overlap in their search for so-called 'blue green' solutions for climate change in urban areas. Therefore, last year they decided to form a subgroup within BEGIN to intensify their collaboration in the form of city-to-city learning. In short: learning from each other's knowledge, experience and expertise instead of inventing the wheel individually.
Citizens
An important aspect within BEGIN is 'social innovation'. This concerns the involvement of citizens, and appealing to their capacities. Also in this respect, it is the BEGIN partners' intent to learn from each other.
Workshops
The collaboration has kicked off in a first series of workshops this week around 'blue green provisions, to reduce the consequences of extreme weather conditions'. Antwerp started the series of workshops on Tuesday, followed by Ghent on Wednesday. Ghent particularly has many situations that are comparable to Dordrecht when it comes to green corridors in the city. Today, it's Dordrecht's turn to host a workshop fort he BEGIN partners. Bradford will finally host their first workshop on February 20 and 21.