One of preconditions of sustainable development is interdisciplinary cooperation of stakeholders from various fields, mutual respect for the interests of each party, as well as understanding of the situations, possibilities and limitations of the other parties. Addressing informative and educational activities to individual groups only make the groups continue to stay in their circles and never step to another ground.
In order for the sustainable development process to run properly, the groups who are truly correlated with the effects of built environment must integrate on multidimentional levels:
- Public administration (including local governments) – that charts directions for the development and delineates frames for public space
- Architects and urban planners – that put into practice the guidelines of the public administration
- Investors and entrepreneurs – without whom neither the guidelines of public administration, nor design concepts of architect and urban planners would ever be implemented.
The project concentrates on building partnership and understanding, not competing, and thus reaches to the beginnings of sustainable development idea, i.e. to replacing governing with co-governing.
The project stresses the importance of non-economic factors whose meaning for the local development keeps growing. From the perspective of practitioners and EU policies, non-economic factors play an important role in sustainable development. Experts from the World Bank agree that sustainable development is based on a key ability to cooperate with people and organizations for the sake of common goals. Throughout the cycle of three conferences, the project will make it possible to establish local partnership and networks that will pave the way for the development of communities. What is usually missing in projects is social capital building – knowledge, skills and trust. The level of expertise on sustainable development in Poland is getting more and more advanced, although still – as research findings and the surrounding reality show – it requires comprehensive and thorough education, both in terms of theory and practical application.
