Active Rooftops South Europe (aRTes) is a European research and innovation project aiming to transform underutilized urban rooftops into multifunctional, accessible, and climate-resilient spaces. With a strong focus on cities in Southern Europe, aRTes combines physical solutions, such as modular raised floors, photovoltaic pergolas, and inclusive rooftop access, with digital tools for co-design and stakeholder engagement. The SURF Lab at the University of Cyprus contributes to the project’s participatory design methodology, rooftop transformation scenarios, and stakeholder engagement strategies. Through real-world pilot sites and community-based co-creation processes, aRTes seeks to unlock the untapped potential of rooftops as infrastructures for sustainability, social inclusion, and urban regeneration.
Research
This project examines how migration is governed and contested across the island’s urban spaces. It traces the asylum process as written in law alongside lived experiences, exposing gaps between formal procedures and everyday realities. The study maps the infrastructures of the reception system—camp spaces, bureaucratic pathways, policing and surveillance, and NGO support—together with the counter-spaces and practices of resistance that emerge. Methods combine ethnography, participatory action research, policy review, and spatial observation with collaboration among migrants, NGOs, first-line practitioners, academics, and host-society groups. Analytically, it mobilizes border epistemologies, assemblage thinking, urban morphology, and spatial justice to examine how agency is territorialized and deterritorialized through everyday urban practices.
Responsible Researcher: Ana Maria Ricchiardi Hernandez
PS-U-GO stands for Participatory Skills for Sustainable Urban Governance. We’re on a mission to create Urban Living Labs (ULLs) where students, local residents, urban planners and policymakers collaborate to address urban challenges and co-create vibrant, sustainable communities.
PS-U-GO will implement Urban Living Labs (ULLs) as educational spaces involving stakeholders from the quadruple helix to experiment and test ideas and solutions to urban challenges. The ambition of the project is to enable place-based civic participation to address issues of public concern in respect to common values. The aim is to equip students with advanced participatory and soft skills for sustainable urban governance through innovative education, set in real-life environments.
Co-creating knowledge on forward-looking transdisciplinary planning perspectives addressing climate change and urban life in the post-pandemic city. InPlaLabs aims to form a multi-level, multi-stakeholder network of knowledge nodes on integrated planning to exchange, co-create and share knowledge on transdisciplinary planning perspectives. This novel approach is based upon the necessity to cover the inadequate synergy and lack of systemic collaboration in planning-related higher education with their surrounding knowledge ecosystems of practice and policy actors to co-create the crucial knowledge on forward-looking transdisciplinary planning perspectives and the required green, digital, and intercultural skills to address climate change and urban life in the post-pandemic city.
TWIN2EXPAND will enhance research capacities in evidence-based urban design and planning (EBDP) as a field of critical importance in the R&I of integrated approaches and technologies for effective spatial planning and sustainable urban governance. The project facilitates a partnership among University of Cyprus, three leading institutions in the field (University College London; Chalmers University of Technology; Polytechnic University of Turin) and one pioneering SME practicing EBDP (Space Syntax Limited). By addressing urban sustainability, TWIN2EXPAND will contribute to achieving targets of the Cyprus Smart Specialisation Strategy, the EU Green Deal and the Sustainable Urban Development Goals. The strategic objectives of the project are to enhance research excellence and promote interdisciplinary research and networking in the EBDP field, and to make a broader impact on the scientific community and society.
TWIN2EXPAND embraces the international networking ethos of the SDGs to achieve scientific excellence in the R&I of the built environment, fully embedding it within the quadruple helix by fostering collaboration with local authorities and other stakeholders. It aims to achieve a scientific and integrative approach to urban planning and governance as the entry point into effective transitioning to sustainable development. Focusing on emerging concepts and challenges in the field, the project proposes a generalised conceptual and working model of evidence-based urban design and planning.
By embedding open science practices within the project’s activities, TWIN2EXPAND will make significant contributions to research excellence, scientific advances and societal progress, implementing three pathways to maximise substantive real-world impact:
- innovative capacity-building in research management and excellence in the EBDP field;
- co-creation of evidence-based urban design and planning knowledge; and
- emphasis on translation of scientific knowledge to professional practice knowledge
The main objective is to develop, pilot and assess innovative educational methods, tools and material towards an integrated planning approach that takes –holistically- into account urban planning/design, mobility planning, participatory planning and evidence-based planning, since an integrated and holistic planning approach is essential for planning a people-centric, inclusive and climate-resilient city.
This novel approach is based on the rationale that, urban and transport actions for tackling climate crisis need to be considered in parallel and in combination, informed by state-of the-art evidence-based findings, and to be community-tailored through participatory planning to ensure the ownership of these measures by all stakeholders, and ultimately their efficiency and long-term prospect.
The BIP engages students to collaborative design approaches in diverse social, economic, and technological neighborhood contexts. It provides students with the knowledge and skills needed to operate in contemporary collaborative environments, utilising the skills and knowledge of others, and becoming trans-disciplinary practitioners, responding in a reflective and empathetic manner to the demands, constraints and opportunities afforded by the context within which design practices occur and by the engagement between people, materials, and technological practices.
