News of European City Centers

FRANCE – Brest, the unexpected colorful city!

In 2018, the city of Brest launched a unique project in France: “Objectif Couleurs“. This device encourages residents to repaint the facade of their houses with bright colors. This scheme is the result of a grassroots process. Indeed, in the 1990s and 2000s, the local association of the Loucheur neighborhood decided to repaint their facades without official approval. Afterward, the…

PORTUGAL – Braga reward cycling

The benefits of cycling are now not to be proven: exercise, health, traffic, accessibility for all public, quality of life, or noise. Yet despite the beautiful weather conditions, Portuguese cities can have trouble convincing drivers to trade their cars for a bike. Thus the city of Braga, alongside Istanbul (Turkey) and Tallinn (Estonia), took the opportunity offered by the European…

CYPRUS – A shared garden to empower local communities in Nicosia

In the heart of the Cypriot capital city lies a peaceful community garden. The story goes that in October 2019, an energetic team called Gardens of the Future presented their project and won the Climathon Nicosia Concours. This award kickstarted the project to makegarden reality. With the help of hundreds of volunteers, the derelict space soon became a flourishing sustainable…

AUSTRIA/BULGARIA – Two ways to involve citizens in the energy transition!

Switching their energy supply to renewables is central for municipalities to reach their carbon emissions goals. Being one of the most local green energy makes photovoltaic particularly easy to get city dwellers involved. Thus Dornbirn in Austria (50 000 inhabitants) and Burgas in Bulgaria (200 000 inhabitants) are taking two different but complementary paths to reach their goals. In Dornbirn,…

SPAIN – Tropa Verde, how to reward citizens for recycling!

In Santiago de Compostela, the municipality created a unique way to encourage its citizens to have sustainable and environmentally friendly behavior: by giving them rewards! The program is called Tropa Verde (“green troops” in English) and fights the biggest barrier against recycling, which is habits. The principle of Tropa Verde is simple: as a citizen, you deliver your recyclable waste to…

ESTONIA – Tallinn revives industrial areas in the heart of the city

For a long time, the capital of Estonia was quite an important industrial hub of the Baltics. Since the 1990s, the country’s economy radically switched to the third sector, especially betting on Tech, innovation, and tourism. This successful turn is now visible in Tallinn’s landscape. Let’s look at two former industrial neighborhoods that radically transformed into trendy and creative spaces….


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*This event is not organized by the French Government. However we have been allowed by the French Government to use the emblem of the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union.