Best Practices Hub - Vienna

Part of the solution - the City of Vienna's UN-HABITAT Best Practices Hub

 


Slums or informal settlements, war-torn cities such as Bagdad or Sarajevo, city dwellers without access to water and sanitary facilities - these are the spheres of activity covered by the mandate given to the United Nations agency for human settlements, UN-HABITAT, in the context of the Millennium Development Goals defined by the United Nations. However, more generally, the mandate also includes sustainable cities - cities which for several years have been the preferred form of living for the majority of the world's population.

To show that cities, however, do not only involve a variety of problems, but for centuries have been associated with hopes for a better and freer life by many people, is one of the goals of the UN-HABITAT Best Practices and Local Leadership Programme, which was established in 1996 to gather information about the numerous social and technological innovations made on a daily basis in cities all over the world and to share the knowledge underlying these innovations with others. The Best Practices and Local Leadership Programme is a partnership network consisting of 26 partner organisations from all spheres of civil society: governments, city administrations, NGOs, academic institutions and private parties.

According to the UN's definition, best practices are innovative programmes whose effects are already visible and have been evaluated, which have been implemented in partnership with the parties concerned and which are sustainable, that is which are viable in financial, ecological and social terms. For more than ten years, best practices have been gathered from all over the world, have been incorporated into a database and have constituted the basis of the technical expertise which UN-HABITAT provides to cities.

Since 1999 the City of Vienna is partner of the UN-HABITAT's Best Practices Programme. Within the partnership network, it acts as the technical centre for urban environmental technologies and as the regional centre for Central and Eastern Europe.

In ten years of working with best practices, Vienna's Best Practices Hub has become a knowledge pool for urban solutions. With the transfer of the Hub office to TINA VIENNA at the beginning of 2009, this knowledge pool will develop into a modern centre for knowledge management. TINA VIENNA's expertise is based on more than 3,000 evaluated urban programmes which represent innovative solutions from different cities of the world and a network of 25 partner institutions working with these programmes at international level. With the help of the Best Practices Hub, looking at the processes of innovation in the individual cities, identifying the factors of success behind unusual co-operations, and finding out whether these programmes actually had the desired effect may be both an informative and an incredibly versatile introduction to the conception of urban programmes.

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Since 1999, the City of Vienna has been a partner in the UN Habitat Best Practices and Local Leadership Programme. In line with this programme, the Best Practices Hub Vienna serves to promote the exchange of experiences, expertise and knowledge relating to a sustainable settlement policy. The regional scope of the Vienna Hub covers Central and Eastern Europe, while its thematic focus is on urban environmental technologies.
The major task of the Hub is to act as a regional best practice partner of the Dubai International Award for Best Practices, which biannually identifies best practices of sustainable human settlement development through a global call for submissions. Activities performed by the Hub also include the maintenance of relations with regional partners, periodic exchange with programme partners and active participation in the relevant bodies of UN Habitat.
The operational integration of the Best Practices and Local Leadership Programme at TINA VIENNA took place at the beginning of 2009.

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