| On 12th of October 2017, a group of Chinese and European experts from the URBAN EU-CHINA project participated in the General Assembly of the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP SCC) and organized a breakfast session related to the collaboration of European and Chinese cities. The discussion brought valuable insight on the future of EU-China collaboration and ideas to overcome challenges in cross sector collaboration.
Within the last years, any collaboration between European and Chinese cities have been established. In general, the interest from both sides is very high to collaborate, work on joint projects and to learn from each other. However, the collaborations in many cases could be deepened to facilitate concrete projects. The participants underlined that the brokerage service URBAN-EU-CHINA is providing is an important activity to arrive at real cooperative projects. More concretely, the challenges which need to be overcome to stimulate cross-sector collaboration between EU and China have been discussed. The main take-aways for URBAN-EU-CHINA were the importance to match the ambitions and expectations between different stakeholders. Furthermore, the importance of city-to-city collaboration was mentioned as being central to stimulate exchange. |
