The kick-off meeting of the Placemaking and Sport project was held in Copenhagen on 10-12 October 2023. Gehl (Denmark) and BG Be Active, Bulgaria (online) attended the meeting as placemaking experts. At the same time, five organisations and the pilot cities of the project, Azur Sport Santé (France), UISP and UISP Matera (Italy), MOVE Malta and Sport Malta (Malta), DGI and the City of Copenhagen (Denmark), DES and City of Valencia (Spain), met for the first time in Copenhagen.

The Placemaking and Sport project gathered five grassroots sport organisations together with five pilot cities, and two expert organisations in order to address the challenge of shortage of sport facilities by utilising public space more broadly as the venue for sport and physical activity. Using public squares, plazas, parks etc. for physical activity and sport accommodates the need for citizens to be active at the doorstep. It also meets the growing demand for activities in the (urban) outdoors. 

The objective of the project is to enable sport organisations to rethink their sport and physical activity offers through placemaking, and to pilot specific placemaking infrastructure developments and new activity programmes in public spaces in five European cities.

Thanks to Gehl, the project team had a tour around Copenhagen's placemaking examples and visited areas that had an important impact on the transformation of the city where community needs are at the centre of urban design. They also had the chance to play the MOVE game (Jeu Bouge) that Azur Sport Santé developed.

The kick-off meeting of the project proceeded with the planning of the activities throughout the project cycle, the expectations of the partners from the project and the first ideas of the placemaking activities to be held in five pilot cities.

The website of the #PlacemakingSport project will be ready very soon and we will continue to share updates from the project.

About the project: The Placemaking and Sport Innovative European Solutions project has been co-funded by European Commission under the Pilot Projects & Preparation Actions (PPPA), PPPA-SPORT-2022 GRASSROOTS-INNOVATION Programme.