Moving frontiers - new countries joining the CIVITAS Initiative
By Lahti, Antalya and Sakarya signing the CIVITAS Forum Declaration the Initiative welcomes two new countries Finland and Turkey. These countries made CIVITAS a sustainable urban mobility research network of 30 European countries. The rapidly growing membership proves that urban mobility is a real issue in the region.
Lahti is a city of 100,861 inhabitants 100 km northeast of the Finnish capital Helsinki. Its main strategic objective in transport is to pioneer sustainable community infrastructure through the development of bicycle and pedestrian traffic and public transportation.When asked why Lahti chose to join the CIVITAS Forum Network, Maarit Virtanen, project planner replied: “Lahti joined the CIVITAS Initiative, because the city has ambitious plans for being a green city. This includes, among other things, the strategic aims of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions by 50% from the 1990 level by 2025, and creating excellent bicycle, pedestrian and collective traffic systems. However, sustainable transportation is not easy to create we hope that through the CIVITAS Initiative Lahti will receive fresh views and new ideas on sustainable transportation, and also have an opportunity to network with other cities and share best practices”.Two cities from Turkey also introduced in CIVITAS. Antalya is a city of 775,157 inhabitants, located on the Mediterranean coast of southwestern Turkey, and works on its long shoreline in order to turn it into an attractive touristic resort with excellent public transport. Sakarya is located at the other coast of the country namely the Black Sea.The CIVITAS Network now includes 180 members, with the most recent arrivals being Beja (Portugal), Zamora (Spain), Leon (Spain), Reggio Emilia (Italy) besides the aforementioned three. Their sustainable urban mobility policies, plans and initiatives are detailed at the CIVITAS Forum Network’s web page here, as part of a broader survey to map the efforts of all CIVITAS cities during 2010. Therefore over the course of this year, details on approximately 50 further cities will be added. Csaba Mezei, representative of the CIVITAS Secretariat welcomes this development as an “excellent tool for learning more about CIVITAS cities, especially non-demonstration cities who may be looking to get involved in the Initiative in the future.” (Non-demonstration cities are those indicated in green on the Network Page). The CIVITAS Forum Network’s web page has also recently been expanded with the addition of two maps. The first is a Google-integrated interactive map that is constantly updated when a new city joins the network. A printer-friendly version of this map is also available for publishing purposes, in the traditional CIVITAS corporate design format.
