URBACT is a European programme for sustainable urban development. Since 2000 the programme is advocating the exchange of experience of european cities. At the same time it provides support in their local economic, social and environmental challenges.

Cooperation within the network

The URBACT networks help cities across Europe to plan, implement and share sustainable solutions to today’s economic, social and environmental issues. Networks bring together 5 to 12 cities to work on common challenges for up to two and a half years. Three types of networks are available to you:

• Action planning: to help you design integrated strategies or action plans to meet specific local challenges.
• Implementation: to help you put your plan into practice by overcoming concrete implementation problems.
• Transfer of good practices: to help you understand, adapt and reuse a good practice that has already achieved results in a European city.

Improving local capacities and sharing knowledge

Through training, tools and a specific methodology, URBACT strengthens the skills and capacities of your city staff and local stakeholders. The aim: to help you develop, implement or transfer participatory and integrated local policies and actions.

Whether involved in URBACT or not, your city has free and easy access to a wide range of urban-related content and knowledge. You can browse through our policy papers, thematic reports, city cases, articles, toolkits and guidelines for urban practitioners on various topics. Benefitting from the expertise of contributors from all over the world, the URBACT website and blog are kept up-to-date with articles, news and opinions on the latest trends and topics related to urban development in Europe and beyond.

Support and budget

URBACT finances 70 - 85% of all networking activities. A network budget averages between EUR 600 000 and EUR 750 000. A specific budget of EUR 127 000 is provided so you can benefit from the best thematic and methodological expertise on urban issues. The URBACT Secretariat and the National URBACT Points are on hand to help you making the most of your transnational learning activities, and more generally to help you achieving the desired results.

Get involved

Join or lead an URBACT network through competitive calls for proposals. Calls are generally launched once a year and will continue to be launched throughout the entire programme period. By joining an URBACT network, your city commits to delivering concrete solutions for tackling local urban challenges in the perspective of improving local policies. Using carefully designed and tested methods and tools, we make sure that your city benefits from exchanges and learnings with cities across Europe that can feed into your local actions, and vice-versa.

The German Association of Housing is the national information point for Germany and Austria

The national information points (National URBACT Points) are important for the public outreach. The German Association for Housing cooperates with the Austrian Conference on Spatial Planning (ÖROK), the contact point for Austrian cities. The work is aligned with the The Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community and the Austrian Federal Chancellery.

The information point informs about new project calls, answers questions about the application process, organises events and informs the public and experts about the results of URBACT-projects. On a regular basis, the German Association of Housing organises URBACT Information days. The following homepage is held in German:

• www.urbact.eu (English)
• www.urbact.eu/urbact-deutschland-und-oesterreich (German)