Project title:  Inter-regional Cooperation for Sustainable, Integrated and Smart Planning (Smart Planning)

Project aim: To strengthen capacity of local and regional stakeholders in spatial and strategic planning, enhance stronger cross-border perspective in strategic development planning to foster coherent development and effective collaboration across borders.

Target groups: local municipalities, NGOs, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders, regional organizations.

Project partners: Latvia Kurzeme planning region (lead partner) and Association Klaipeda region, Lithuania (partner).

Main activities:

• Smart Planning will elaborate a capacity building and leadership program for local stakeholders. Kurzeme Planning Region will carry out Spatial analysis of Kurzeme Region in cross-border and future smart specialization context. Smart Planning will provide an opportunity to spatially analyse territorial development trends and address them targeted and purposefully. Klaipeda region will develop an action plan for regional specialization horizontal priorities, analyse cross-border functional region development and cooperation opportunities.
• Leadership program complemented with key conclusions from the analysis carried out in Kurzeme and Klaipeda regions will conclude in a Handbook for Cross-border Planning that will summarize the challenges that are raised by the local stakeholders and provide approaches to tackle them.
• Project main outcomes will be presented in the Final Conference of Smart Planning where cross-border challenges will be discussed, joint activities to tackle them suggested and project results presented.