Report Startconference

On Wednesday October 8 2008 the kick off was given to the DC NOISE project. More than 75 people from 9 different regions in Europe came to Boekelo-Enschede to be part of the launch of the project Demographic Change:
New Opportunities In Shrinking Europe (DC NOISE).

State Secretary for the Dutch Interior and Kingdom Relations, and DC NOISE ambassador Ank Bijleveld-Schouten opened the DC NOISE start conference by stressing the importance of DC NOISE: “It is a vitally important project about an issue whose significance I fully appreciate.“
In sparsely populated areas like rural Friesland, Groningen and Zeeland the consequences of decline are visual. The solutions are not easy to find. According to the DC NOISE ambassador population decline clearly demands a shift in thinking at local and regional level. Cooperation between municipalities is needed. At the end of her speech Ank Bijleveld-Schouten expressed the wish to contribute to the project, especially by sharing knowledge and experience through the knowledge network and to be involved in developing strategies to get a maximum benefit from population decline. Click here to read the complete speech.

Twente: Lead beneficiary

Karel Loohuis, Mayor of the municipality of Haaksbergen and member of the council of the Region of Twente, Lead Beneficiary of DC NOISE then explains why Twente took the initiative for the DC NOISE project. Twente is facing diminishing growth, and prognoses show a stagnation in 2020. Moreover, there is already a strong trend of ageing, combined with fewer young people, which results in a shrinking labour force. Therefore the Region of Twente decided to raise awareness on the consequences of demographic changes and include many stakeholders in this process to create involved networks. To raise awareness and work on new strategies and solutions for the consequences of demographic change in the different regions Karel explains that each of the partner regions implements demonstration pilots within the field of the labour market, service provision and housing and that together the partners will implement 3 truly transnational pilots on monitoring, housing and the EU labour market, with the ambitious goal to influence the policy makers on national and EU level.

Case: Parkstad Limburg

As an example of how to deal with the consequences of demographic change Bertine Jongerius shows the experiences of Parkstad Limburg, stressing the importance of involving all stakeholders and working together in the process. Her advise to the DC NOISE partners is to accept population decline, anticipate and invest.

After the inspiring and very informative presentations Adrian Healy, the chairman of the day, asks the (political) representatives of all the partner regions to take place in the panel and to reflect on the presentations.

Launch of the website

Then it is time for Karel Loohuis, as representative of the lead beneficiary of DC NOISE, the Region of Twente, to launch the DC NOISE website as one of the instruments to share and exchange knowledge about demographic change and how to deal with the consequences of that. Have a look at WWW.DCNOISE.EU!!

Partners agreement

To strengthen the commitment of all 9 partners in the DC NOISE project, Roos Galjaard, the transnational project manager asks all the partners to sign the partner agreement for the coming 3 years.

Workshops

The afternoon contains discussion in much smaller groups in 4 different workshops.
Each of the workshops tackled extremely important dimensions of the challenge facing us:

The housing challange the housing challenge (click here for the workshop on innovative housing)
The productivity challenge facing the labour market (click here for the workshop on labour market)
The monitoring challenge
The communications challenge (click here for the workshop on communication and ICT)

Key messages

At the end of the day Adrian Healy draws up some key messages from the start conference:
Firstly, is the nature of the demographic issue facing us.
Secondly, is the importance of winning the 'psychological' battle.

What during this conference has clearly demonstrated is the need to prioritise. The importance of selecting, and then concentrating on, a limited number of themes. This is the approach that DC NOISE is taking. Today has also demonstrated the importance of monitoring within this, so we know precisely what the nature of the problem is, and how we are dealing with it.

The workshops demonstrated that there is no one answer, because there is no single problem. But they also demonstrated that by working together we can raise awareness, and understanding, of the possible responses. And we can raise the profile of the issues to encourage more concerted actions, particularly at a national level.

Three other points that were taken away from the discussions are:

The importance of having political support
The need for cross-departmental working, both within and between authorities, and
The importance of learning from others and the value of having national-level support

Finally, certain phrases that seem to summarise the day very neatly: