In the past few months, on Local Matters, we have talked quite a few times about the situation of the Ukrainian refugees here in Luxembourg. We have witnessed a huge wave of solidarity and we’ve followed some of the initiatives around that try to make life easier for the people who fled the war.

This week on Local Matters, we are going abroad. Many regions in Europe face the same challenges and some even bigger ones. The city Lodz is located in the centre of Poland. For decades, they had a thriving textile industry and many Ukrainians have already been living in Lodz for decades when the invasion started. Lodz has around 700.000 inhabitants. 80.000 of them are Ukrainians whose families came to work in the textile factories.

This year, with the war in Ukraine, another 120.000 people from Ukraine came to Lodz seeking for peace and shelter. For today’s interview, I am happy to have had the chance to talk to the mayor of the city of Lodz. I met Hanna Zdanowska at the margin of a conference on the EU’s cohesion policy in Brussels. The cohesion policy is a financial tool to support the regions of Europe in their ecological, technological and social transition. Lately, it has also served to manage the emergency of the Ukrainian refugees. Hanna Zdanowska is part of the committee of the regions in Brussels, an institution that represents the European regions and cities at the administrations of the European Union. Hanna Zdanowska is our guest today on Local Matters. In this interview, we talk about how the city of Lodz manages to support all these refugees.

Photos: Mirek Pruchnicki/flickr; wikicommons