NewTwinCities

Public Project Idea Active 2 months, 2 weeks ago

The concept of twin cities is a very old form of cooperation between municipalities. The oldest one is probably from the 9th century. A lot of partnership emerged after WWII as a way to promote concrete citizen exchange and friendship in the post-war Europe.

Nowadays there are many twin cities through the Alps but lot of the partnership are limited to cultural activities and travels. Very often, the dynamic of twin cities partnerships relies on a very small group of persons in each municipalities. Frequency of the exchanges are low. Some partnership had difficulties to restart after COVID-pandemic.

Cooperation in the Alpine Region – especially in the framework of Alpine Convention and EUSALP – are not focusing on municipalities. Networks such as Alliance in the Alps or Alpine Town of the Year are of course good exchange platforms but do not focus on developing twin cities.

Active twin cities could contribute to put a bridge between alpine wide-cooperation bodies and citizens, offering a concrete way to tackle common alpine topic such as culture, circulation economy, energy and climatic transition.

This project aims at revitalize the concept of twin cities partnerships in order to include new target groups (especially youth people) and to tackle modern topics (such as circular economy or energy transition) using also the opportunities offered by digitalisation. Tackle this issue in a transitional alpine perspective will allow to address more concrete common topics than developing this project in a European-wide project. However, some results of this project can be also relevant for twin cities partnership outside the Alps too.

To reach this goal, the projects intends
– to establish an exchange between motivated municipalities – with different sizes and in different geographical contexts – to exchange on their own practices of twin cities.
– to test and implement new forms of twin cities partnership with some of these municpialities

Project Idea Type: Governance (Priority 4)