UW students visit the Regional Development Institute

We recently wrote about UW’s summer school, which is an international cooperation. Each year, UW visits one of the partnering countries and learns about their approaches on "smart shrinking" as a development approach for de-populating regions. This year UW is the hosting country. The group, which consists of seven UW students in the Coastal Communities and Regional Development master's program, Matthias Kokorch academic director, and 24 students from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland, are currently travelling in north-Iceland, visiting small municipalities.

We caught up with the group on day three, which was very packed and took them to different places in Northeast Iceland. They started their day with a visit to the Regional Development Institute (Byggðastofnun) in Sauðárkrókur. According to Matthias Kokorsch academic director, the group received a very nice welcome and got five different presentations on current issues regarding community development in Iceland. These presentations spurred some great discussions afterwards.

UW will hopefully find opportunities in the future to visit this institute more frequently, as it addresses the core themes of the master’s program in Coastal Communities and Regional Development.

“We then took one of the most scenic coastal roads to Siglufjörður where we had our lunch break. This will be one of our case study localities and we got a first impression of this exciting place, which offers countless opportunities for researching a place in transition.” - says Matthias.

After Siglufjörður, the group travelled to Akureyri, where they received a presentation from the local planning director and the city council. The day ended with a visit to Vistorka, a company that promotes the production of environmentally friendly fuels through the sustainable utilization of raw materials generated in the Eyjafjörður area.

We look forward to hear more from the group as they learn more.