Xiamen will host the finale of the International Awards for Livable Communities 2013 from Nov 28 to Dec 2.

Known as the LivCom Awards, the five-day event will include presentations and an award ceremony. Other highlights include a symposium on the latest urban development strategies and a promotional event for the host city's Beautiful Xiamen project.

About 600 officials representing more than 50 cities and communities from around the world will take part in the finale.

Sponsored by the International Federation of Parks and Recreation Administration and the United Nations Environment Program, the annual LivCom Awards was launched in 1997 with the aim of encouraging best practices, innovation and leadership in the creation vibrant, environmentally sustainable communities that provide a better quality of life for ordinary people.

Dubbed "the Green Oscars", the LivCom Awards is the world's only competition for local communities that focuses on environmental management and the creation of livable communities.

According to the event's London-based organizing committee, this year's competition involves the participation of 200 cities from 23 countries, including China, France, Australia, the United States and South Africa. Among them, 45 cities have reached the finals.

To date, more than 100 cities and communities across the world have received LivCom Awards. Previous Chinese winners include Changde, Dalian, Hangzhou, Quanzhou, Shenzhen, and Xiamen.

Xiamen won the first place in Group E, reserved for cities with a population exceeding 1 million, during the 2002 contest in Stuttgart, Germany.

During his recent visit to Xiamen, Alan Smith, CEO of the LivCom Awards, said Xiamen has done a wonderful job in terms of balancing economic development and environmental preservation.

Xiamen's efforts to prepare for the event are praiseworthy, Smith said, adding that he is looking forward to seeing a finale filled with novelty and creativity.

Sun Samei, one of the Xiamen delegation members of the 2002 competition, described the preparations for the event as tight and a bit nerve-racking.

Many city government departments were involved in the process, including the environmental protection bureau and the construction bureau, Sun said.

As an official of the Xiamen Environmental Protection Bureau at the time, Sun was responsible for giving the presentation at the competition in Stuttgart.

"It was a challenging task to present the city image in a short time, say, 10 minutes, given that the amount of material was huge," Sun said.

Sun, who spent about two months preparing for the final, said she lost count of how many meetings she had to sit through in order to present the city's image properly. .

"The desk was always piled high with sheets of paper, notes and reminders, and you had to sort through it," Sun said, adding she had to ask almost all acquaintances to get a photo that could demonstrate the harmony between the city's people and the environment.

William Brown, an American who has lived in Xiamen since 1988, also contributed to the Stuttgart victory with his presentation.

The first official foreign permanent resident of Fujian province said he was initially reluctant to join the team for the event.

"The LivCom Awards was formerly known as the Nations in Bloom competition, and I thought it was all about the environmental issues and I knew nothing about it," Brown said.

But when he realized that what the Xiamen city government needed help with was the presentation, Brown changed his mind.

A professor at Xiamen University's MBA Center, Brown has taught business studies for graduate students since 1989.

"I didn't see the event as a competition. I treated it as marketing. The presentation was about communication and marketing. That's what I'm familiar with," Brown said. "The preparation process was full of pressure, and I had to stay up late for about two weeks to drag the right stuff out of the abundant material."

One of the problems was that the Xiamen government wanted the presentation to focus on the aesthetics of the city, Brown said.

"The city is pretty, but that was not the judges wanted to see," Brown said.

He recalled that Xiamen in the 1980s was not a nice place to live. People burned coal, and the air was polluted. He said he had to carry candles to the bookstore because the power infrastructure was unreliable.

But the government and the people were really determined to improve.

"The improvement was what made me stay in the city, and it could impress the judges," Brown said.

Brown added that the key to success in Stuttgart was to pick out the right information to pique the judges' interest.

Because the event was not only about environment but also culture, Brown mentioned that Xiamen was the home to the first Chinese Protestants during his presentation.

Because the Protestant revolution was initiated in Germany and the first Western Protestants were Lutherans, this fact was a way to appeal to the German judges, Brown said.

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(China Daily 10/10/2013 page7)