In the plenary meeting of the future search conference the themes and ideas which had been worked out were presented. As long as their realisation was agreed on concrete goals were also described. The details of this process of developing one's intentions were worked out in more detail in the report of the Krems conference. (1)

One point among others is the ecological design of open space along the Danube. The project understands itself as a contribution towards EU regional policy for the cooperation across the borders along internal and external EU borders. It offers already in advance of the project developments the chance to go for a transdisciplinary approach among the local, regional and higher partnerships socio-culturally, economically and technologically.

At this point, inspiring planning tips became apparent for the participants as can be conveyed, on the one hand, in the cooperation of universities and administrations and, on the other hand, due to the exchange of experience of cities with quite diverse legal and planning systems. It is one of the major insights of the BRIDGE - Lifeline Danube project that despite such differences we established our priorities for sustainable development in a new way because we had exchanged knowledge, insights and experience beforehand.
The real success of the city network - noticed by the public as well - begins to emerge only when the cooperating partners manage to

make the first results accessible to the respective decision-makers who can then start a political process of developing intentions,
assign the various quasi pilot projects to short-,.medium- and long-term goals which had been defined by our commonly devised development programme,
describe possible and realistic strategies for the implementation of the stages of sustainable development.

For these goals no institutional contact was at the project team's disposal yet on grounds of the present project structure, the elected project organisation, and the concept of cooperation. It remains fairly open whether the leaders of urban development (not all of whom participated in the project team) will succeed in introducing the results into the politically decisive committees and in implementing them with the support of scientific experts within a useful period of time.

The implementation of the (rather) short term and mainly regionally limited pilot projects (hot spots) should cause few problems in contrast to those projects which need an agreement of more than two or even all partners in such development programmes that cross borders and are centred around complex issues of sustainability, i.e. long term economic, ecological, social or cultural issues.

The latter also require new committees for preparing the development of political inten-tions and decision making and the setup of an interdisciplinary advice committee which does not only give a professional opinion on the development process but also accom-panies it continuously.

ANALYSIS AND DIAGNOSIS OF DATA

A central part of our work at the three events was to obtain, in a preceding process of forming opinions, instructions and proposals for dealing with existing and future projects. We sought for suitable planning approaches for sustainable development in the cities along the Danube on the basis of present spatial planning. While the kick-off meeting aimed at developing visions, the second milestone, the Bratislava seminar, focused on making the individual areas of work concrete. This happened by means of a presented discussion and through establishing priorities (diagnosis) in a plenary meeting of the representatives of the city network.

The suggestions of the teams were evaluated by the participants through the allocation of stickers. This made apparent for all participants which issues had outstanding priority in the city network and for which planning projects an optimum solution had to be found quickly.

Another selection of best practices for the respective topic was made by diagnosing the various solutions. Different forms of town planning methods were presented graphically and compared with each other with the help of a list of criteria. This resulted in the fact that mainly for the hot spot group new approaches for river bank design could be visualised and now also be integrated into the repertoire of other cities. Learning from each other took place in a completely comprehensible process. The diagnosis of town planning projects is supposed to happen along these lines in the future. In the future, existing open space in the surrounding areas of cities will be redesigned in a participa tory process (AGENDA 21) and offered to the groups of society involved for use.

Director Ongjerth and Prof. Csemez from Budapest made fundamental statements on the topics of biocorridors and agglomeration development in additional studies presented in the plenary meeting of the final conference in Györ. The paper of Prof. Csemez will be published in full length in our publication Visions for the Danube Region.