Seminar "City that we want“

On January 18th and 19th, seminar “City that we want” was held in Zagreb.  There were 14 people from 10 CSOs (Centar za životnu sredinu, Green Tour, OKC Abrašević, Yugocycling, CEKOR, Young Researchers of Serbia, Proaktiva, Priroda i društvo, CEE Bankwatch and Zelena Akcija)  from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia and Croatia. One transport expert from Urbanistic council of Republica Srpska also joined the seminar.

Most of the cities in the region are facing similar transport problems – rapid increase of number of cars, low public transport quality, low bicycle paths quality, reduction of public and green areas because of construction of car oriented road infrastructure. Because of that, goal of the seminar was to exchange experience in the campaigns between regional CSOs that are working on transport related issues.

First day there were presentations about impact of urban transport on the quality of life in cities, about urban planning and about possible solutions of overextended car usage. Second day CSOs presented their own campaigns in order to exchange knowledge and experience with other participants of the seminar. CSOs will continue to cooperate through an e-mail list that will help them to be more successful in their campaigns.

Based on the evaluation questioner, participants of the seminar were most satisfied with the following:

• established contacts with other CSOs, that will be useful for their future work
• logistic informations before the seminar
• logistic informations that were provided during seminar

All the participants have rated this with 5 – the highest mark.
After that, participants rated other parameters with following average marks:

• presentations were useful and interesting – 4,86
• comfort of place where seminar was held – 4,86
• content of presentations of the seminar – 4,57
• quality of the discussions during the seminar – 4,57
• breaks between the presentations – 4,57
• time-length of the presentations, seminar, breaks – 4,43

We can conclude that participants were rather satisfied with every aspect of the seminar, concerning that lowest average mark is 4,43. Rates that are relating the content of presentations, usefulness of presentations and for establishing of new useful contacts are very high, so it is obvious that seminar was successful. But for some similar events, this evaluation questioner showed up that breaks should be little bit longer and that time-length of seminar should be shorter.