During the transnational online meeting held on 16, 17 and 18 November, the partners in the Vilawatt UIA-URBACT Transfer Mechanism project got the chance to learn first-hand about the host city: Nagykanizsa. We got to see the real situation in the city and the country: how energy is managed on a national and local level, how they get citizens involved, good practices in energy efficiency, etc. This allowed us to analyse the potentialities for transferring the Vilawatt experience to their city.
The three days combined work sessions and sharing and learning sessions with the cities, focusing on deepening knowledge of each of the Vilawatt pillars and of each partner’s current local environment in terms of the energy transition.
As Nagykanizsa Mayor Lászlo Balogh noted in the inaugural session: “The challenge of fighting climate change requires joint preparation in which we learn from each other and maintain a strategic attitude.”
In this regard, the partner cities took advantage to share their expertise and initiatives, following the URBACT method, that can help each city draft its Investment Plan (adapted to its situation and the local resources) and kick off, in the future, their own version of Vilawatt. For Viladecans, as the city leading the project, the end goal is to draft a proposal to adapt the Vilawatt project to the current needs of the citizens of Viladecans, in line with the city’s strategic context.
The transnational meeting gave us insight, on the one hand, into how committed Hungary and Nagykanizsa are to citizen involvement in energy management through innovative projects; and, on the other, allowed us to delve deeper, through a webinar, into how to get citizens involved in energy efficiency projects.
As part of the event, the partner cities took part in two learning webinars to deepen their knowledge in the five pillars of the project. In this case, the themes discussed were collective energy purchasing, with examples like Wikipower (Belgium) and MVM (the national gas and electric company of Hungary); and citizen engagement in projects for the ecological transition, in which Viladecans presented its successful citizen participation system.
Vilawatt – UTM, which is part of the European URBACT program, is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund
