In 2017, the Nordic Council of Ministers launched the project Attractive Nordic towns. This was one of several initiatives to strengthen Nordic competitiveness, including by promoting a green transformation with less emissions and a healthier environment. The project focused on challenges and opportunities in small and medium-sized Nordic cities in Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Denmark. The goal was to create inclusive urban environments that are economically, environmentally and socially sustainable.

“There are many investments in big cities to solve the climate crisis,” said Jon Andersson, Lund's project manager. In the Nordic region, there are mostly small or medium-sized cities and in the project we collaborate to see how they can work to be attractive and sustainable. This is a way to strengthen cooperation and relations between cities. All cities face fairly similar challenges. We have a lot to learn from each other about civic dialogue and how to involve more people in planning processes.

Lund's focus was to look at how cities can better interact with citizens and other stakeholders. In 2018, a delegation from the Nordic Council of Ministers was in Veberöd to get examples of how to work with village development and civic participation through its own website and app. There they met Jan Malmgren in Smart Villages, which is part of Future by Lund and the SOM project. At the beginning of 2019, a new delegation from the Nordic cities arrived and met Håkan Samuelsson from the Technical Administration and Katarina Scott from Future by Lund.

Håkan Samuelsson is the project manager for the urban planning project Västerbro. He presented how Lund is working to change and densify the new district of Västerbro. Since the area is already partially built-up, the municipality has had a number of property owners to talk with about how to create a new residential area in tune with the remaining activities. The method that has been used to create sustainable construction at the urban building level is Citylab action, developed by Swedish Green Building Council, and in this way, in the spring of 2019 you are almost there at the Letter of Intent with all property owners.

One of the participants was Petter Voll from Verdal in Norway. What do you bring from your visit to Lund?

“I think it was interesting to hear how to use citylab to turn an industrial area into a residential area,” he said. We ourselves are designing methods for a citylab that deals with how we are going to transform large parts of the city center precisely.

Another participant was Tove Nordgaard from the municipality of Levanger.

“I found the bottom up perspective very fascinating. We want the voices of the residents to be heard, which is why this project was very inspiring. It was interesting to hear about the plan for how to take care of the cultural heritage in the industrial area and see it as a resource, she said.

Katarina Scott from Future by Lund talked about how to involve villages and took examples from the work in the innovation tour Barcamper, in which coaches and investors in a mobile home visited smaller villages to reach entirely new groups of entrepreneurs. Lund also has a collaboration with Giffoni, a village in Italy that organizes the world's largest festival for children's and youth films and works with innovations. Veberöd is also a testbed in Future by Lund's work with smart technology. One of the reasons is that it can be faster and easier to test technology in a smaller community.

A number of medium-sized and smaller cities participate in the project, and from Sweden it is Lund, Växjö and Ystad. Lund cooperates with its twin cities Vaasa (FIN), Hammar (NO) and Viborg (DK. Other cities are Sønderborg, Middelfart, (DK), Pori, Salo, (FIN). Akranes, Hornafjørdur, Mosfellsbæer, Fljotsdalsherad (ISL) and Narvik, Innherredsbyen; Levanger, Steinkjer, Verdal (N).