3 May 2022 | Tecklenburg
Four communities in the Tecklenburger Land, a part of the district of Steinfurt, have joined together to form an action group in order to compete with cities and major centers in a rural region and perhaps even to prosper better.
Besides city marketing as a discipline in marketing, the projects "ARDENT, Entrepreneurship in rural areas" and "GRENSPAS - Tourism on both sides of the EUREGIO boarder" offer a lot of experiences and approaches for the LLLT project.
Because the cooperation of the four municipalities is in the foreground. Four smaller towns and communities as "one big town" and one goes to the individual communities as "districts" to do something there ("one community instead of four communities"), so the town of Lengerich stands for good jobs, the town of Tecklenburg for tourism and culture, Lienen for leisure, recreation, nature, Ladbergen for infrastructure and mobility. The weaknesses of one municipality are the strengths of the other, so they complement each other. However, each municipality still has its own identity.
The municipalities do not compete with each other, but together against other cities and regions.
Methods in the project: benchmark best practice of cooperation regions with 2-3 cities, survey of a sample of citizens of the four municipalities via paper-pencil and via Facebook, focus group in the form of a citizens' breakfast, trend map of the Zukunftsinstitut, etc.
From previous Science-to-Society projects of the S2BMRC, it has emerged repeatedly: Citizens are not "consumers," so the solutions and recommendations will include citizen engagement. Engaged and "entrepreneurial" citizens themselves are to some extent also (co-)responsible for initiatives, projects, and their implementation. However, it is then the task of politics to support them, to clear the administrative hurdles and barriers out of the way, and to secure funding.
