On May 11-12, Sofia City Hall and Sofia Development Association hosted the second meeting of the partners of the AGORA Project - Advanced coGeneration Opinions for Reintegrating Local Assets, of which Chisinau is a part. A meeting of the Steering Committee and a transnational capacity-building seminar took place in the Bulgarian capital.

Partners from Chisinau, Cluj-Napoca, Koprivnitsa, Kranj, Neckar-Alb region, Prague, Czech Republic, Slavonski Brod from Croatia, Szarvas from Hungary and Zenica from Bosnia and Herzegovina, they met both physically and online.

The AGORA project meeting - included various activities, including exchange of experiences between members, mutual learning about joint creative processes, regeneration agendas of different cities, renovation pilot projects and stakeholder involvement initiatives. The participants in the meeting also visited Toplocentrala - the pilot project in Sofia, met there with the team and saw the river that needs to be integrated into the usable area.

Representatives of other Bulgarian municipalities, stakeholders and other INTERREG Danube projects in the field of culture and urban regeneration also joined the transnational capacity building workshop. The participants worked together on the pillars of the AGORA capacity building toolkit, which will be further developed within the Project. These range from financial and business models to stakeholder involvement, from equitable spatial planning to sustainability.

The AGORA project is implemented within the INTERREG Danube program and is co-financed by European Union funds (ERDF, IPA II).