Happy New Year - the Chinese Year of the Dragon! Every Chinese New Year 130 million people in the world’s most populous country head back home to their villages for family celebrations. It is the world’s largest human migration and the story is captured in the film “Last Train Home”. It focuses on one family spanning 3 generations and their annual get-togethers between 2006 and 2009. It combines documentary and drama to give a picture of how the different generations have become fragmented by China’s urban economic growth.

As coastal urban areas continue to grow, tourism is an important and growing economical factor, and nature and natural resources are to be protected, this leads to new challenges: How to safeguard drinking water availability and quality? How to manage riverine and coastal floods? How to design new urban areas and how to retrofit existing ones? At 3rd International BaltCICA Conference cities and regions presented their solutions and approaches for these challenges.

“Is the Eurozone crisis helping Europe’s economies to reform?” asks debatingeurope.eu and spoke to Finland’s Minister for Europe and Foreign Trade, Alexander Stubb, to ask him about the importance of market pressure on economic reform.

Imagine you would go to the next parking lot in your town to get some fresh fruits or walk to the closest civic building to help yourself with some herbs and succulent greens. In the British mill town of Todmorden this is not a fantasy. Thanks to the Incredible Edible program Todmorden not only grows its own vegetables, improved civic life and reduced crime are witnessed results as well.