On the occasion of the 5th European Territorial Employment Pact Seminar, 25 – 27 January 1999 in Bremen, I met colleagues from London, Hamburg, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Malmö. After a common coffee break during this conference, we decided to launch a common and loose network of Metropolitan Territorial Employment Pacts between our cities and to visit each other in a first step. And so we did…. in the first 10 years only with small grants, our mutual visits were financed by ourselves, a very fruitful experience.
The Network existed already since 10 years when we decided to establish MetropolisNet as a European Economic Interest Group (EEIG), in other words: as a company. Gsub supported this network from the beginning by financial and personal resources, but at the same time we “profited” a lot from this network. Our first project in 2001 was named AVALON, `Added Value of Local Networking´, a comprehensive study presenting innovative projects all over Europe how you can successfully implement local activities for combatting unemployment and enforcing employment in different cities. As a project manager and developer you often dream of mainstreaming your good ideas, that they have impact and will be sustainable. In this sense from my point of view the biggest success had been the establishment of “District Alliances for Economy and Employment” in all Berlin districts. It was a direct follow-up of the Territorial Employment Strategy of the European Union and the pilot project of the Territorial Employment Pact Berlin – Neukölln. Over the years, gsub had been involved in many European and MetropolisNet projects which you can find on our Website www.metropolisnet.eu , so I do not want to go too much into detail.
What I really like are the strong and reliable ties and relationships between the different MetropolisNet members. This was one of our basic ideas at the beginning: to build up a partnership with professional and reliable partners committed to better inclusion and access to education and labour market for vulnerable groups, for decent work and social cohesion, against racism and populism, for empowering migrants and other disadvantaged groups.
We as MetropolisNet can take into consideration the new global and European trends like digitalization and migration that will influence European policies and up-coming programs as well as our projects. And they do already. It does not mean that we follow each trend, but current challenges need new innovative solutions, in particular in big cities and from the ground, and on micro-level. The “European Pillar of Social Rights” can be a good guide in the direction we should go. Regarding the economic basis of our company MetropolisNet EEIG, I hope that we will be able to not only work based on grants, like we did successfully in the past ten years, but also based on contracts – to strengthen our financial foundation and to bring our experience and our mission also to candidate and pre-accession countries, for instance.
Dr. Reiner Aster is the Managing Director of gsub mbH and MetropolisNet EEIG
