News

15 November 2017

9 new cities join the Smart Mature Resilience project at Thessaloniki launch event

19 cities and municipalities met in Thessaloniki (Greece) on 7 November for the Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project's Stakeholder Dialogue. At the event, nine new cities joined the SMR project’s seven cities, who have been working for over two years to develop tools for strategic resilience development in cities.

Four of the new members are experienced in this area through ICLEI membership: The Greater Amman Municipality (Jordan), Malmö (Sweden), Münster (Germany) and Rekjavik (Iceland), or participation with ICLEI in projects, for example the Greater Manchester (United Kingdom) through the RESIN project, or are part of other international networks: Athens (Greece), Malaga (Spain), Stirling (United Kingdom) and Thessaloniki (Greece).

Giorgos Dimarelos, Deputy Mayor for Urban Resilience and Development Planning, shared Thessaloniki’s journey towards resilience amid intense challenges and demonstrated how the city had successfully won regional support to develop the coastline area in collaboration with neighbouring municipalities.

Kristiansand (Norway), Greater Manchester and San Sebastian (Spain) are, like Thessaloniki, coastal cities, and each city shared their experience with preparing for crises caused by flooding. Kristiansand and San Sebastian are applying the SMR tools to self-assess the city's policies and levels of resilience investment and to better understand risk interdependencies.

Clara Grimes, ICLEI Europe, trained the cities on communicating best practices for resilience in cities using narrative methods. Effectively communicating projects in cities is essential so that citizens and stakeholders can better understand and connect with a city’s resilience efforts.

Stirling, Malmö, Glasgow (UK), Vejle (Denmark) and Rome (Italy) shared their local best practices, including community group activities in Stirling, crisis management in Malmö, resilience education in schools, and a design school ‘designing’ ways for severely disabled people to make meaningful friendships in Glasgow.

For more information, visit the project website.