The Metropolitan Century; are we fit for the future?
Europe’s unseen prosperity that it reached in the last decades, goes parallel with a growing sense of uncertainty on all levels: climate change as we pay the price for pollution and exhausting resources, disparities as wealth is not evenly distributed, wars between rivalling powers, and so on and forth.
As expressed in our Manifesto for Metropolitan Partnerships, we believe that metropolitan regions and areas are best in place to address the many challenges we face: understanding the bigger picture and translating that to a metropolitan scale to find solutions with local partners.
Following the Manifesto’s launch we continue working to better prepare ourselves: by developing approaches on the urgent planning issues, our basic profession; by organising ourselves to be more agile, efficient and accessible for all, the way we are organised; and by inviting people to imagine together a metropolitan future for Europe.
At our Brussels conference we will open these three flows of thinking to our Members and beyond to then develop them over summer and report back at our Autumn Conference in Bucharest, October 2024. We will approach Members for their participation in these flows, which will appear online and/or live. We need Members’ input to make it work.
The METREX Spring 2024 Conference will take place in Brussels to coincide with activities for the Belgian Presidency of the Council of Europe.
Observer and Rapporteur from this Spring METREX Conference will be Iván Tosics, PhD, Managing Director Metropolitan Research Institute Budapest, Hungary.
Main photo: revitalised Boulevard Anspach in Brussels (copyright RdA Suisse)
