Add us as your preferred source on Google to see more of our content in Search.
Add to Preferred Sources?30 September – 2 October 2020
Virtual event
For the last 25 years, the European Conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns has offered cities and urban stakeholders, as well as regions a platform for inspiration, action, and the commitment to take sustainability to the next level.
The conferences call for the acceleration of bottom-up action and change, to ultimately push and accelerate the ambition of global frameworks for sustainability and climate change. Held every three years, the conference is the multi-level interface between the European Union and sustainability action at the local level.
Bringing to the forefront of ongoing trends, challenges, and opportunities, the conference aims to shape the future beyond the status quo. Over the years the conference series has resulted in thought-leading political documents that move frameworks and agendas as well as provide guidance and tools for cities driving sustainability for the benefit of their citizens.
The world is facing major environmental, economic, and social challenges that require a substantial transformation in all aspects of society. By now, societal awareness and a sense of urgency for action on climate change, loss of biodiversity, and global resource depletion are widespread. However, implementation of the transformation we need has been sluggish – hampered at global level by zero-sum politics and vested interest economics. Simply put, our current, exclusively growth-based system is not fit for a sustainable future. Our behaviour is contradictory, we want to overcome these challenges, but only a few seem willing to go against established routines. We need courageous leadership, who take responsibility to overcome this contradiction.
In 2020, all those that can make change happen will gather at the Mannheim2020 conference. Become part of the transformation and join mayors, local government practitioners, civil society and all other urban stakeholders, business, national governments and European institutions, and help us transform Europe for a secure and sustainable future.
On the agenda:
- What is the change we need and what can cities do to make this happen?
- How can a European Green Deal become a true opportunity for change?
- What is the social and environmental impact of digitalisation and what is its public value?
- What is the perspective for a sustainable economy we need?
- How local and how global are the perspectives for a new economic model?
- Who is responsible? And who pays the bill?
- How can integrated urban development and management respond to the challenge?
- What do our citizens want and what can they do themselves?
- How can we step up citizen mobilisation for positive transformation?
- How can this become the transformation that we all want?
- How can we scale up local action to the national and European levels?
How do we go mainstream? - Who else do we need to make this happen?
Original source: Mannheim2020
Published on 24 July 2020