City of Walbrzych - mitigating social and economic challenges
Multi city workshops
Overview
The brief for the project included arranging a multi-day workshop involving representatives of European cities which had faced similar problems to Walbrzych, as well as other experts. This was to enable discussion of the relevance and details of the improvement programmes in other cities, and their application to the Walbrzych context. Such a workshop would also allow for a peer exchange of know-how and experience about the management of the transition process and help relevant stakeholders in Walbrzych to successfully navigate the recovery of the City.
Following the initial interviews in the city, the research team explored their analysis of the issues in Walbrzych so far through a presentation to a wide range of city officials in Walbrzych. This took the form of a PowerPoint presentation and extended discussion, talking through what a wide range of other cities had done and relevant examples of good practice.
A number of cities were selected for preliminary visits by the research team and Walbrzych officials and stakeholders, as an initial preparatory stage before a workshop to be held in Walbrzych in May. Before these could take place, however, the Covid 19 lockdown was imposed, and the visits had to be cancelled.
It was then agreed that the workshop would still go ahead, but in the form of four multi-city workshops to be held using Zoom video conferencing. These were arranged for May, and the final workshops, showing the topics, cities and expert advisors involved, is below:
Workshops were provided with simultaneous translation throughout, with a choice of English or Polish.
Due to the workshops being online, considerable additional preparatory work had to be done.
- LSE contacted each city in advance to discuss the brief for the workshops.
- Walbrzych and the external cities and experts then exchanged information in advance, and this selected key parts of that information are included within the "background documents" sections on this page.
- Further discussions were then held by the LSE team with both the external cities and Walbrzych to consolidate the issues to be discussed, and that was set out in a "Framework" document produced for each workshop.
- The final preparatory stage was an exchange of draft workshop presentations, and advice from LSE on any suggested changes. The final presentations are in that section of this page.
- The workshops themselves were recorded and these recordings are also provided on this page.
At each stage the documentation being exchanged was translated. Consequently the various documents on this page appear in both Polish and English (sometimes with Polish on supplementary pages). The Zoom workshops had simultaneous translation, and the full video recording includes the English audio channel, while the Polish simultaneous translation version is also provided as an audio channel.
