On 13th December Marie-Noël Tournoux, Project Director WHITRAP Shanghai participated in the “Workshop for Thought Leaders Guangzhou Award 10th Anniversary Celebration”, in the Sub forum 2 on “Green Cities and Climate Resilience”. She also attended the “Green Cities and Climate Resilience” sub-forum 1 on the 13th of December.

Since 2012, the City of Guangzhou, in cooperation with the United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), and the World Association of the Major Metropolises (Metropolis), has organized the “Guangzhou International Award for Urban Innovation (Guangzhou Award)”. The Awards aim to promote exchanges of experience in urban innovation and sustainable development. They have become an important platform for exchanges and cooperation among global cities, and a repository of examples of case studies.

Since 2015, in the framework of the Awards, the three organizers have launched the Workshops for Thought Leaders, which aim to promote knowledge sharing and capacity building for cities and local governments around the world by showcasing the case studies of the Guangzhou Award. The 4th Workshop’s theme held from 12th to 14thDecember was “Innovative Cities, Shared Future”. The Workshop was divided into4 sub-forums, respectively focusing on “Green Cities and Climate Resilience”, “Urban Heritage and Cultural Preservation”, “Diverse Cities and Inclusive Development”, and “Innovative Cities, Technology and Governance”.

The sub-forum on “Urban Heritage and Cultural Preservation” was co-organized by the UCLG Committee on Culture and the one on Community on Urban Innovation. Nicholas You, Executive Director of the Guangzhou Institute for Urban Innovation, chaired the session.

Five projects were presented through short dynamic presentations. The first project focused on tools set up by the Dublin City Council to develop and foster civil society cultural engagement and promote different types of initiatives and activities. The second project, from the City of Izmir, “Boosting up Culture as a key for resilience and development. The Historical Port City of Izmir”, focused on reusing and reconsidering heritage intrinsic qualities and traditional systems today as well as reutilizing and giving a contemporary use and function to historic places, in particular to buildings in the historic areas of the City. The third project, which was presented by the City of Teheran, focused on “Urban Heritage and Culture Preservation in Tehran. The project showcased several initiatives led by the municipality to protect and help restore and reuse urban heritage and give a new function to buildings. The last two projects focused on the City of Guangzhou. One showcases the overall strategy of integrating historic areas in the city planning scheme and the other more specifically on a specific type of urban area, the Yongqing Fang Alleyway of the Liwan District.

Presentations were followed by expert comments from Ms. Marie-Noël Tournoux, Project Director of WHITRAP Shanghai, Mr. Jordi Pascual, Coordinator, Secretariat of UCLG Committee on Culture, Ms. Peng Shengfang, Professor and Vice-Dean of the School of Innovation 
Design, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

All five projects demonstrated how local governments include culture and heritage awareness as mainstream priorities and develop the necessary tools and mechanisms to ensure cultural engagement and integration of conservation through urban regeneration of historic residential and commercial districts. They also showcased the people-centred approach followed by municipalities.