Project partners meeting in Bratislava, March 2011

Vital Landscapes project partner coordination meeting was held in Bratislava from 16th to 18th March 2011. The main focus of the meeting was to discuss the work progress of WP3 project partner group - scientific framework and practice analysis. Participants presented analyses of previously completed projects from different transnational programmes such as INTERREG, TRANSBORDER programmes and PHARE. These projects were presented from the viewpoint of good practice examples of landscape development and landscape management. A comparative analysis of planning systems in participating countries was also presented, with the focus on dealing with landscape, European Landscape Convention implementation and the role of public in the planning system and decision making processes. In this part of the meeting, the participants had a chance to take part in the project workshop, which used the cloud method to gather further recommendations to define good practice. This was followed by the presentation of the progress of GIS visualisation tool for simulating spatial development and the first findings of the Slovak research on Landscape Convention.
Project partners also revised the completed work, listened to the lead partner responses to the first financial report and discussed the planned workload for the following months, especially the pilot regions project work. Slovak project partners organised a site visit of pilot region areas Bratislava-Rača, Svätý Jur,Modra wineyard town, Cerveny kamen, Smolenice and Oresany.
The next project partner meeting will be in Slovenia on September 22nd and 23rd 2011. Until then, project partners will meet within their workgroups to work on individual pilot regions. Slovenian workgroup meeting is announced to be held in Ljubljana on the 10th and 11th May 2011.