Area Based Collaborative Entrepreneurship - improving our district centres
From June 2018 until May 2022, the Council worked in partnership with the Institute of Place Management (IPM) and partners across Europe as part of the Area Based Collaborative Entrepreneurship (ABCitiEs).
In Manchester we focussed on District Centres. We monitored the number of people visiting the centres at all times of the day and year and the IPM analysed the data to see what it told us about each centre, what’s worked well and what could be improved. The information was then shared in workshops with local people, retailers, landowners and other interested groups to consider how we can all make our centres more attractive and lively by working together. The project was a pilot in a few centres and partnership working in Withington, one of the pilots, is showcased in a short film commissioned by ABCitiEs.
The ABCitiEs partners received a grant from the European funding body Interreg to investigate how companies, councils and other local groups can work together more effectively to improve the area or create opportunities for local people. Other ABCitiEs partners involved in this project were Universities and Councils from Amsterdam, Athens, Vilnius, and the conurbation Varazdin-Cakovec (Croatia). The project documents can be viewed on the Interreg website.
