The European Benchmark of Local Public Services
Ports, canals, factories… adapting infrastructures to new contemporary challenges.
Many unknown biases affect our behaviors, and hence our management style.
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The city of tomorrow is a city adapted to the youth of today. This raises the issue of our local authorities’ relationship to youth. It is also the city that will be able to respond to the ecological challenge: how to better understand the issues and contradictory injunctions? What concrete solutions for our local authorities?
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Thanks to the mobilization of many personalities, the participants in the BEST study seminar in Berlin benefited from a very rich programme, combining historical perspective, field visits, contemporary issues and project dynamics.
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There is an urgent need to organize the ecological transition. If the time has come for national prospective scenarios, the metropolises have a major role to play in this undertaking and are doing their utmost to do so, in particular to adapt their own mode of operation or to bring about behavioural changes.
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From one metropolis to the other, the relationship between local authorities and universities vary a lot. It may often need strengthening but its potential for strategic and fulfilling cooperation for both sides is undeniable.
Recruiting et retaining workers is a challenge for every metropolis, requiring very elaborate action plans.
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Digital giants, local startups and participatory democracy on the one hand, municipal governance, forgotten cities and a desire for the state on the other: the paradoxes of transition in metropolises.
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Crises are events that public actors must anticipate, knowing that they are rarely predictable. These are also pivotal moments that invite the reform of institutions or organizations, to organize recovery and strengthen the resilience of territories. François Bayrou, former minister, new French High Commissioner for Planification and local elected official, did us the honour of participating in this meeting to discuss the lessons he learned from the COVID crisis, his vision of “planification” in the 21st century and its own role. Two Local Authority Chief Executives then shared their experience of crisis management by local authorities.
The health crisis has revealed the importance of fluid coordination between state services and those of the local and regional authorities as well of an efficient sharing of responsibilities, which leaves room for differentiated approaches depending on the diversity of local situations. Expectations are high for a recovery plan that right away reactivates the socio-economic dynamics of the territories and accelerates their ecological transition.
Climate, biodiversity, resources …
The inventory is more than worrying. Urgency and long-term collide, solutions will be systemic or will not be.
The Chief Executives of the larger local authorities are well-positioned to understand it, and they act, but the magnitude of the necessary changes is still difficult to imagine.
Brussels, home to many international institutions, is a Region that is still facing various challenges: increasing poverty, significant population growth, low employment rate … The Brussels Region is also full of opportunities, seized by the public authorities, to become an ambitious capital, safe, with “soft” mobility, with accessible housing, pleasant to live in. The complexity of the distribution of competences pushes the various institutions to find synergies and collaborations, in order to propose to the citizen the best possible services.