The International Urban Greening Week 2023

Open up your potential! A two-week challenge-based learning exchange on The International Urban Greening in Finland and Netherlands is coming in 10.-22.4.2023.

The International Urban Greening Week  is an extraordinary chance for students and teachers to gain experience in international cooperative learning. In total more than 30 students and teachers from four countries (Finland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Denmark) will participate this two-week experience. Participants will solve real-life challenges related to the themes of urban greening in Tampere Finland or in Utrecht/Houten, the Netherlands. Participants will challenge themselves and learn new things at the same time.

Working in Teams to Solve Challenges

The International Urban Greening Week will consist of three building blocks: a challenge, workshops and excursions. Students and teachers will form teams to work on a  real-life challenge, in which they do research, execute practical work, and will go on several excursions. The two-week challenge will be concluded with a presentation on the findings.

The challenges in Finland and the Netherlands will both involve community participation in urban greening, but the focus of the challenges in the two countries will be different.

The challenge in the Netherlands is to convert the vision of the municipality of Houten “More, better and connected green!” into policy and planning for the two station areas: Houten Central and Houten Castellum. The learners will focus on the following principles:

• Biodiversity: choice of soil management, assortment, organisation and management. How to connect with surrounding green structures so that flora and fauna have an ecological connection.
• Well-being: social value of green. How to promote safety, recreation, participation and nature education for people’s wellbeing through different design and management.
• Climate adaptation. How can the station area contribute to climate adaptation where green-blue measures can be a solution for peak load, drought, heat and pollution.

In Finland the challenge asks how to create participatory activities in the Hatanpää or Hiedanranta park for the community and what are visible and invisible communities in a park? In this challenge the learners will learn how to:

• identify different communities and the links between them, communicate with different communities
• distinguish what are the benefits of belonging to a community
• what a community benefits from an individual member
• how different communities can improve biodiversity in their neighbourhood
• how different communities adapt to a changing climate and generate well-being in a holistic way

The International Urban Greening Week Will Grow

The exchange is coordinated by two project partners schools from The European Platform for Urban Greening, AhlmanEdu in Finland and Yuverta in the Netherlands. Finland will welcome 17 participants from the Netherlands, Denmark and Czech Republic, while the Netherlands will welcome 14 participants from Finland and the Czech Republic. The exchange is co-funded by Erasmusplus.

The International Urban Greening Week 2023 is the first of its kind. In this pilot, two countries are doing an exchange, but within the European Platform for Urban Greening, attention should be paid more to international cooperative learning for regular vocational students and teachers in the field of Urban Greening. To accomplish this, the aim in the future is to involve and encourage more project partners to participate in exchange weeks to challenge coming urban greening professionals.

Stay tuned for more!