On 13 & 14 September 2023, ICLEI Europe joined up with its proGIreg partners in ICLEI Member Zagreb (Croatia) for the project’s final event. This was an opportunity to highlight the main successes of the past five years, bringing Nature-based Solutions (NbS) to post-industrial areas in Europe and China. During the two-day event, partners discussed the key results (such its business model catalogue), as well as the approaches used to achieve these results.

Zagreb was a fitting host for proGIreg’s final event. As highlighted by Deputy Mayor Luka Korlaet, the city has replanted 10,000 trees destroyed by storm, is continuously introducing green spaces in city blocks, and is expanding pedestrian zones. Furthermore, Niksa Bozic, head of the Institute for Spatial Planning for the City of Zagreb, emphasised that Croatia’s capital has a proud history of looking at other cities, such as Vienna or Belgrade, for examples of best practices for green urban planning. Bozic also noted that after Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia, urban planning in Zagreb shifted from public areas towards individual plots. Now, based partly on concerns from citizens, there is a shift back to public planning.

The solutions seen during Zagreb’s study visit are a good example of this shift. ProGIreg stands for productive Green Infrastructure regeneration, and as such, aimed to implement solutions that provide measurable economic benefits, that go beyond merely the improvement of living conditions and the reduction of vulnerability, to citizens and entrepreneurs in post-industrial districts. This is the case in Sesvete, a suburb of Zagreb, which has, with the support of proGIreg, implemented a community garden for growing fruits and vegetables, a modular urban farm and a therapeutic garden for children with disabilities. These children can come with their parents to the garden and find a safe space to interact with others, while also having the opportunity to grow their own their own veggies, enabling them to contribute to society.

Co-creation is also one of the principles of co-design for urban regeneration, alongside flexibility, long-term thinking, and experimentation. These principles, developed by project partner ICLEI Europe, were all applied in practice during workshops in the project cities, which beyond Zagreb, include front-runners Dortmund (Germany), Turin (Italy) and Ningbo (China) and follower cities including ICLEI Member Cascais (Portugal) and Zenica (Bosnia and Herzegovina), as well as Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Piraeus (Greece).