Forum for cities: Creating and disseminating innovation

The Forum for Cities (Fórum pro města), organised by the Ministry of Regional Development of the Czech Republic (MMR) and its subordinated European Urban Initiative (EUI) Urban Contact Point Czechia, provided a platform for stakeholders from various levels of government to discuss how (urban) innovation can foster new solutions for local challenges in Czechia, in the spirit of “doing things differently”. The European Urban Knowledge Network (EUKN) supported the forum with a scoping paper on Czechia’s current status of employing EU funding schemes to enhance urban innovation, and provided recommendations for the future.

Apart from EU Cohesion Funds, Czechia needs to harness untapped potential from other EU funding and capacity-building schemes, such as Interreg, EUI Innovative Actions and URBACT. The schemes can strengthen innovation in and between all Czech regions, thereby reducing regional disparities between the capital region and other regions. Nevertheless, as Czechia’s economic growth is expectedly going to make future EU structural funds less accessible, it needs to utilise its existing capacities and restructure its governance to innovate the country from within, independently of EU funds.

During the forum’s interactive part, consisting of 36 stakeholders from 25 cities from across the country, the participants exchanged and identified several key challenges to tackle in Czech cities, such as mobility, demographic development and climate change. They also discussed the main barriers to solving these challenges, mainly relating to governance quality such as the lack of cooperation between cities or the lack of a shared vision for innovation.