CityLab Daily: Mayors Convene in Amsterdam for CityLab 2022
Also inside: Norman Foster on rebuilding Ukraine, and European cities get funds to transform asphalt into art.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko spoke to the CityLab summit in a recorded interview.
Photographer: Jennifer Sondag/Bloomberg
Mayors from Kyiv, Bogota, Washington and some 40 other cities joined urban innovators and experts for day one of the CityLab summit in Amsterdam on Monday — the first in-person meeting of the conference since 2019. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was high on the agenda, with city leaders from Lithuania, Poland and Latvia discussing the challenges they face, including accommodating an influx of newcomers fleeing war. In Gdańsk, Poland, Ukrainian refugees comprise almost 10% of children enrolled in the city’s schools. Elsewhere, Riga, Latvia, took in about 16,000 refugees in the early days of the war.
Meanwhile, renewed strikes against Ukraine’s cities threaten to further escalate tensions and delay plans for rebuilding. The city leaders underscored the idea that responsibility for managing the toll of this ongoing humanitarian emergency must be shared widely.