Interview: Barbara Berninger, Regional Secretary Europe, METROPOLIS

Jonathan Andrews spoke to Barbara Berninger, Regional Secretary General, METROPOLIS, about the organisation’s growing Policy Transfer Platform to help cities learn from each other, and its recent partnership agreement with EUROCITIES where the platform was presented during EUROCITIES annual conference in Copenhagen/Malmo 

What’s in it for cities to sign up and use the platform?

The platform is a learning and exchange platform for both practitioners and other experts who concern themselves with urban development projects. A good third of our registered experts are employees in metropolitan and local authorities; a third are academics and researchers, and the remainder are entrepreneurs, consultants, NGOs and citizens’ action groups.

Anyone who can contribute relevant expertise can register as an expert.  My qualified colleagues check to ensure that the uploaded material is legitimate and sound and sometimes carry out a small amount of editing. So, the platform works like a combination of Wikipedia and LinkedIn for urban development experts from all over the world. But non-registered users too can see all the content on the platform and use it for their research.

What was the reason for Berlin becoming involved in this and taking the lead?

At first, I wanted to help METROPOLIS cities to be able to continue to exchange ideas and experiences in the periods between annual conferences.

Whilst we were developing this idea, however, three questions stood out as being of key importance to urban development all over the world: Which good developments in other cities can I learn from? What mistakes can I avoid? Why should we reinvent the wheel again and again in different cities in the world if we can use this time more productively? This is how the original idea of a virtual conference forum for urban development experts grew into the idea of an interactive, self-renewing database.

There are many platforms out there, what sets this one apart?

In my opinion, there are almost too many platforms for cities, with the result that the information they offer is scattered and fragmented. Each platform has its own structure, its own search criteria and its own design. Consequently, experts have to invest a great deal of time and energy when carrying out research. It certainly isn’t much fun to look for information on these platforms.

Another reason for this is that a lot of platforms cannot be used intuitively. What’s more, they are often geographically or thematically limited. And a lot of platforms are not accessible to the general public either. So, what I wanted to do was develop a platform that is accessible to everyone and that presents innovative, integrated projects from a whole range of urban policy areas.

In my view, two further aspects distinguish the METROPOLIS Policy Transfer Platform from other similar platforms. Firstly, it combines ease of use with an attractive design, has short download times and can also be used on mobile devices. Secondly, the fact that our case studies are linked to experts who are actively involved in urban development issues encourages dialogue. In this way, we are confronting one of the greatest risks for Internet platforms–the creation of data graveyards.

Just last month you signed a cooperation agreement with the city network EUROCITIES and earlier with the Guangzhou Award. Is the next focus of expanding the platform to move away from the members of METROPOLIS?

There are good ideas and innovations in all cities–whether they are a member of METROPOLIS or not. We don’t want to restrict our platform and then find out that we are losing out on good ideas. We want to have a positive influence on other cities and to learn from them as well. This is why we have now started to establish strategic partnerships with other institutions and with the organisers of urban development competitions.

As part of Berlin’s policy transfer project within METROPOLIS we are working closely together with the Circles of Sustainability Project, run by Professor Paul James from the University of Western Sydney, and the Guangzhou Award secretariat, which also coordinates the UCLG Urban Innovation Community.

In October I was able to agree a partnership with the Secretary-General of EUROCITIES, Anna Lisa Boni. In future, it will be possible for all the winning EUROCITIES Awards projects to be presented on the Policy Transfer Platform.

What activities have there been in the platform’s first year and what success have you had?

In October 2014 at the 11^th METROPOLIS World Conference in Hyderabad, India, we were able to go online with the beta-version of the platform. At that time, there were 40 case studies and only a few registered experts. In the meantime, we have over 100 case studies, many experts and have completed the test phase of the platform successfully.

We have just installed a new function. Projects that have been successful in competitions and either got onto the shortlist or won an award are now given a higher ranking in the search results.

Almost 20 percent of all the case studies on the platform have won an award, which is a clear indication of quality. In the meantime, we have examples from 70 cities on the platform that are worthy of imitation. Around 25 percent of the member cities of METROPOLIS are represented on the platform with good projects. To date, we have recorded visits to our platform from 140 countries and every month 1,000 to 1,500 users visit the platform. That is not at all bad for a database platform that was only launched recently and that has had little publicity. Now that all the teething difficulties of the first year are out of the way, my young experts, who have been looking after the platform from the start, are now supporting me in making the platform even more widely known internationally.

What do you hope to see the platform achieve in the next year?

First and foremost, I hope that next year the platform will become much more widely known and that more cities with interesting, transferable projects will be represented.

So that we get new, good-quality case studies from cities on a regular basis, we will strengthen our collaboration with international urban development competitions. We already present on our platform projects that have won the METROPOLIS Award, the Guangzhou Award, the EUROCITIES Award, the European Green Capital Award, the Dubai International Award, the Lee Kuan World City Prize and others.