Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Milan, September 23 2019 – European municipalities together to identify the best strategies to encourage, influence and support the actions of the private sector in activities related to corporate social responsibility to direct them towards activities necessary for the city. This is the aim of the European project Cities4CSR - Comprehensive municipal strategies to foster and stimulate corporate responsibility in urban areas, financed by the Urbact III programme.

The first transnational meeting of Cities4CSR will be held in Milan and will involve around 35 international participants from the nine partner municipalities: the Municipality of Sofia (Bulgaria), the Municipality of Vraca (Bulgaria), the Municipality of Kekava (Latvia), the city of Rijeka (Croatia), the city of Guimarães (Portugal), the Municipality of Molina de Segura (Spain), the Municipality of Budaörs (Hungary), the city of Bratislava (Slovakia) and Nantes Métropole (France).

During these three days, which begins today and will last until Wednesday, the Municipality of Milan, leader of the project, will organize a series of visits and presentations in companies whose corporate social responsibility falls on the territory for the nine cities "allied" in this challenge Milanese presenting projects such as Ruben by Fondazione Pellegrini and the tactical urban planning intervention in via Venini sponsored by the Scandinavian company Vestre.

The partnerships, local and transnational, aim to exchange and share experiences and skills between European cities to produce integrated action plans that can be applied, at a local level, by the participating cities.

The project is divided into two phases: during the first, which will last six months (from September 2019 to March 2020), working groups will be established at local level and transnational meetings will be organized to exchange good practices between the cities of the network to develop a preliminary study on the role of municipalities in influencing the social impact of local businesses. During the second phase, lasting 24 months (from May 2020 to May 2022), the network will consolidate its activities through the organization of exchange and comparison events between cities, aimed at defining integrated action plans and development of recommendations for other cities interested in the project topic.