6th Partners Meeting on Urban Transformation Best Practices
The CHERRY programme's partners participated in their sixth meeting for the Interreg Europe CHERRY Programme, held on February 20 and 21, 2024 in the city of Kortrijk, Belgium.
The central theme was the presentation and analysis of best practices of urban transformation in the context of policies to support cultural and creative enterprises. A total of 18 best practices were presented by the 9 partners of the project who, in addition to Greece, stemming from Belgium, France, Italy, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, and Finland.
The CHERRY project aims, through the exchange of experiences from implemented policies to support the Cultural & Creative Industries (CCIs), to draw policy conclusions for the further recovery of the sector after the pandemic and the functional and sustainable interconnection of the creative industry with the local economy.
In this context, at the workshop in Kortrijk (Belgium) 4 peer to peer exchange activities were developed on the topic of supporting the cultural and creative industry, in collaboration with local experts of the Belgian partner.
From this pool, the experts of the Interreg Europe 2021-2027 Programme will evaluate the best as good practices of the Programme thus ensuring publicity at the European level. In this way, the partners look forward to the greatest possible extroversion in cooperation with all the parties involved in the project (among which Region of Western Greece Municipalities, Antiquities Ephorates, Region of Western Greece Special Operational Programme Management Service, and others).
The selection criteria is particularly demanding to meet the programme's official “creating a more social Europe” specific objective. This the case as apart from content and potential of cultural creation, its connection with the local business web, as well as its contribution (impact) to local economic and social development were taken into account.
It is noted that the project is co-financed by the European Territorial Cooperation Programme Interreg Europe 2021-2027 which sets a demanding reference framework of criteria that must be met, for the local practices proposed to be evaluated and then presented and promoted at the European level.