What is the second stage of reSITE?
Osamu Okamura
So we invited our specialists from our reSITE network to come to this I would say really top-level workshop. There were representatives of city of Prague, of the district of Prague 6 where this airport is positioned, from the investment department of the Czech Technical University, from the top managers, from the Prague Airport of Vaclav Havel. There were top managers from the railway company because there is also a new railway connection to be built to the airport.
So all these very important people just met. We moderated this discussion. We helped to prepare the material for the discussion. And our specialist like for example Mark Johnson from New York the specialist on I would say industrial areas and urban economy and urban development. He was one of the people with a very good experience from these processes. Then we had Amy Armstrong from Rockefeller Foundation 100 Resilient Cities. Because resilience is one of the major tasks we are facing in our cities today. It means the urban population is still growing and we are meeting with quite unexpected challenges. We have natural disasters. We have different economical I would say dowturns. And we have demographical crisis. We have a lot of challenges that are just attacking the city. And the policy of resilience in the way is the ability of the city somehow to attract the public, the residents in taking care about city. This helps to face all these challenges that are sometimes very urgent, sometimes very dangerous. So the more diverse the city is, the more the community and population is involved in the city making processes the more successful and more resilient city becomes.
So these kind of specialists that are I would say unheard-of in Central Europe still we are bringing to Prague to work on strategy development in very specific areas of Prague today. So this is something we want to enhance more these activities. Of course the city planning is a long-term run it is not something that you can see the result tomorrow. You want to focus more also on education. We are preparing the study programme for students about urban economy and city management. We are also now preparing a grant from EU funds to spread this word to other countries in Central Europe specifically: Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Serbia. So this is what we are working on now as well. So we are just working on multi-level and more levels to make this agenda more spread around that people would get more familiar with and would be able to work with it in their daily practice.
Also at the schools today in here these things are not being taught very well. So it means the landscape planning, the urban planning is sometimes very traditional. I would say in Prague it is still a little bit better because we have a more connections on international level. But in places like Brno maybe or all the second cities and small places the education is also quite behind of what is happening.
And in the same time I would say the ambitions of population of the cities is growing. There are more and more educated people, more and more active people. It means there are more and more people who are not satisfied with what we are getting now. So we want to change for ourselves. I can be very egoistic in this maybe because I want to live in better city myself. And this is the way though our activities and reSITE is a way how to achieve it.
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