A flourishing urban community

 This is where dreams are coming true for the 20,000 or so citizens living in western Aarhus. At the secretariat for the District in Movement

– the URBAN programme, local initiators can obtain support to realize their ideas and initiatives, for the benefit of the entire neighbourhood.

“However, it is the citizens’ projects we support, not those of professional project managers. Citizens come to us with their ideas, and we provide them with useful advice, assistance in writing applications, and with funding,” says head of secretariat Sonja Mikkelsen.

The EU has named the Gellerup-Hasle-Herreds-vang neighbourhood as an URBAN Community Initiative from 2002 to 2007, where the Munici-pality of Aarhus and the EU Regional Develop-ment Fund (ERDF) are financing the URBAN programme. The money will be used to “promote economic and social regeneration of towns and urban neighbourhoods in crisis to ensure sustainable urban development”.

The URBAN programme focuses on three areas: Competencies and jobs, the regeneration of social and organisational resources, and greater integration between culture and leisure time. Sonja Mikkelsen acknowledges that it took a year to convince citizens that the URBAN programme could really make a difference.

“But we invited ourselves to events taking place in the area, we distributed brochures, we put up posters and endeavoured to make contact with the residents,” says Sonja Mikkelsen.

The efforts paid off. The URBAN programme has been involved in more than 50 projects, including a scheme for offering guidance to young people and their parents, supplementing the advice offered by the public authorities concerning the choice of education and vocation. The project proved such a success that it was awarded the Integration Prize in 2005 by the Danish Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs.

“When working and being involved in this area, you see quite a different picture to that depicted by the media. There are many resources here, and they want to be used,” says Sonja Mikkelsen.

Globus1 is one of the many visible results that testify to the programme’s success. Since its opening in October 2005, the multi-hall has housed a host of different activities. The facilities are open from 9 am to 10 pm every day, and during that time a vast range of activities takes place from taekwondo to boxing, football, table tennis and badminton. There is a cosy atmosphere in the café, where people can also surf the Internet.

“The clubs and societies in the neighbourhood rent our facilities, and we also organise other activities which they do not provide,” explains the leader of the centre, Søren Madsen.

“In the school holidays for example, we have arranged activities covering everything from belly dancing to robot workshops and lots of sport. We arranged this for the first time in the 2005 autumn half-term, which started the day after we opened. One thousand people came every day – and of course, once you have or-ganised one successful event out here, it be-comes a tradition!”

The URBAN programme ends at the end of 2007, but efforts are already being made to ensure that the activities and the positive developments continue. The joint councils in Brabrand, Gellerup, Hasle and Herredsvang have together with the URBAN projects appoint-ed a joint work group, which has prepared a proposal concerning a future strategy for western Aarhus.