Land management at the local level is about managing the way land is utilised and the issues regarding land ownership in cities and municipalities. The principal goals of this endeavour are to use the available resources as rationally as possible, provide positive impulses for economic development and protect the environment, while at the same time ensuring socially balanced development. Successful achievement of the above goals requires adequately formulated planning and management instruments and their balanced implementation, as the said objectives are often mutually dissonant.

With this in mind, the German consortium AMBERO/ICON Institute has been assigned to implement, together with partners, the new Serbian-German cooperation project with a view to improving land management at the local level. The lead executing agency is the Ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning of the Republic of Serbia, supported by the GIZ and AMBERO Consulting Belgrade in cooperation with the Standing Conference of Towns and Municipalities of Serbia, other important project partners from Serbia and current GIZ projects additional potentials for synergic action will be exploited. The most important goal of the project is to attune land management to new challenges of the open market economy, which requires that land management should be more oriented towards the laws of the free market than was previously the case. In that respect, the project should essentially contribute to strengthening the competitiveness of cities and municipalities and, together with them, develop adequate instruments to that end. A contemporary land management system also contributes to environmentally sustainable and socially balanced development. Consequently, modern methods and principles of sustainable and participatory urban development will be crucial project components. Significant topics in this context also include the urban rehabilitation of abandoned industrial sites, informal procedures of citizens’ participation, land valuation and the like.

The ambition of the AMBERO/ICON Institute consortium is to contribute to successful project implementation by applying its years’ worth of experience in the field of land management and local development planning and by recruiting Serbian and international experts in these fields, as appropriate.