UrbanA

UrbanA – Arenas for sustainable and just cities

Launched in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany in January 2019, UrbanA is a three-year collaboration to gather knowledge and experience for sustainable and just cities generated by prior projects and to translate this knowledge into action. The Urban Arenas will be co-creative spaces, known as Arena events, in Rotterdam, Barcelona, Berlin and Brussels where city-makers and city-thinkers from across Europe and across disciplines will gather to reflect on the urban knowledge that research projects have already identified, and to generate promising and actionable approaches to the creation of sustainable, inclusive and thriving cities that foster deep forms of democracy and citizen empowerment.

The project will synthesize 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.

The project is led and coordinated by ICLEI European Secretariat, the leading network of local governments dedicated to sustainable urban development, and 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).

BCNUEJ is involved in the development of co-creative spaces of engagement and exchange on issues of urban sustainability and justice. If you are passionate about urban sustainability and justice, you can apply to UrbanA fellows program.

If you are curious to learn more about the design and methods that we use in the UrbanA project, have a look at our resources page, which includes our translocal arena design as well as the mapping guidelines for a database that we are developing with an overview of approaches to making cities more sustainable and just. We will be sharing insights from the arena events and the database on our website over the coming years.

For more information about the application process or about the UrbanA project more generally, you can contact the team at info@urban-arena.eu.