ICLEI: Creating sustainable and just cities through Urban Arenas

A new European research project, UrbanA – Arenas for sustainable and just cities, kicked off in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany last month.

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.

More information about the Urban Arenas will be available on the project website, which will be launched soon.

For more information about the project please contact Matthew.Bach@iclei.org

The UrbanA consortium is led by ICLEI European Secretariat (coordinator). 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)

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822357

Source: Press release European Secretariat GmbH (ICLEI), 14.02.2019