Famalicão will join an Ibero-American network of 150 organisations, including institutions and local governments, dedicated to strategic urban development. The municipality's membership of the Ibero-American Centre for Strategic Urban Development (CIDEU) was approved last Thursday at a meeting of the municipal executive.
CIDEU is an Urban Strategies Laboratory that was set up in 1993. It is made up of more than 150 partner organisations from 22 countries located on the Iberian Peninsula and in North, Central and South America, including cities such as Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Bogotá, Brasilia and Barcelona.
It is the only cooperation programme of the Ibero-American Summits of Heads of State and Government dedicated to urban development and aims to promote a strategic way of thinking about the design and management processes of urban projects in order to achieve the sustainable development of Ibero-American cities.
Famalicão will be the second Portuguese city to join this network, in addition to Coimbra.
Through CIDEU, the municipality of Famalicão will have access to training and international technical cooperation, benefiting from the sharing of learning, projects and experiences, training in urban strategies and the construction of strategic thinking and technical assistance and cooperation for the development of innovative methodologies and projects.
It should be remembered that the municipality of Famalicão has defined an Urban Diplomacy Strategy for the Internationalisation of Vila Nova de Famalicão - Famalicão Alliance, based on the integration and participation of the territory in international cooperation networks, promoting the communication of Famalicão's identity across borders, a goal that has been reinforced with the development of international strategic partnerships, such as joining CIDEU.