Creating sustainable and just cities through Urban Arenas
04/03/2019
The Urban Arenas will be co-creative spaces designed to generate convincing, specific, and actionable solutions towards sustainable cities that foster deep forms of democracy and citizen empowerment.
Over the coming three years, a series of four Urban Arenas will bring together policymakers, researchers, engaged citizens and others – collectively known as city-makers – from across Europe to discuss innovative solutions for sustainable and just cities.
The project will synthesise the knowledge and experiences generated in prior EU-funded research projects that deal with interventions tackling urban social inequalities and exclusion. Arena participants will then collectively assess their potential to improve urban social equity and inclusion, and identify ways of using them in different cities.
The partners working together in the project seek to feed innovative integrated solutions for equitable and inclusive urban areas into sustainability policy regarding, for example, housing, energy, mobility and food. They also aim to empower city-makers to design and transform European cities into inclusive, sustainable and thriving urban and peri-urban environments.
This project is funded with EUR 1,5 milions by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
The UrbanA consortium is led by ICLEI European Secretariat (coordinator), which is the leading network of local governments dedicated to sustainable urban development (Freiburg, Germany). The project is further supported by six organisations from across Europe: University of Freiburg’s Chair of Sustainability Governance (Freiburg, Germany), Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), Central European University’s Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy (Budapest, Hungary), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona-Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (UAB-ICTA)'s Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability, (Barcelona, Spain), ECOLISE, the European network of community-led initiatives on climate change and sustainability (Brussels, Belgium), and the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon’s Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Change (Lisbon, Portugal).