Research

The BIP aims to deepen the knowledge and skills – theoretical, methodological, ethical and professional – on sustainable city for the 21st century and SDG goals. Lefebvre (1968) concept of the right to the city has inspired several studies from different areas and remains today an important subject for critical scholars with an interest in the urban issue. In this, the term urban commons (Hardin, 1968 and Ostrom, 1990) has gained momentum in recent years as part of the approaches to design the city. Commons concept offers potential to encourage a more socially sustainable and bottom-up approach to participatory placemaking. The Blended intensive programme (BIP) about right to the city, includes lectures, collaborative thematic workshops, and study visits to neighborhoods in the field. During the BIP, a group of participants undertake 5 days physical mobility at Iscte Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto combined with a compulsory virtual component that counts towards the overall learning outcomes.

KAEBUP’s main objective is to create an international educational and training method offering participants the opportunity to engage with professional environments, learning how research can be the basis for innovative professional practices and what businesses in the field of planning, architecture and urban design require from academia. Successful enterprises in Europe have made research outputs the core element of their practice to address pressing urban challenges including sustainability, mobility, health, and social cohesion. KAEBUP’s partners comprise HEIs, NGOs and enterprises from different European cities, who have expertise of evidence-based design and wish to strengthen the links between businesses and HEIs to mutually benefit from the tools that research can provide to enterprises and from the experience of evidence-based practice. The cooperation between KAEBUP’s partners will be the key for addressing current needs and developing future educational systems providing students with the skills to enter the professional world and inspiring HEI staff to innovate through research.

KAEBUP will achieve its objectives by implementing three ‘pathways to evidence-based urban practice’:

1. Innovating learning and teaching through knowledge exchange and skills development working on real-life urban projects.
2. Understanding and developing business models for evidence-based urban practices.
3. Co-creating urban knowledge through multiple modes of exchange and involvement of students, teaching and company staff in teaching, research, and practice.

KAEBUP will foster entrepreneurial mind-sets among HEI students and staff and benefit businesses through broader access to research outputs and clearer communication of how academia can support them. The Alliance will also produce clear and transferable results in relation to how urban studies curricula can best support transversal skills development.

Housing in many European countries has become unaffordable for many. In fact, it is now considered to be one of the most important national issues in Europe and its solution is proving very challenging. Providing affordable and sustainable housing is a complex task involving multiple disciplines, sectors and actors and requires transdisciplinary research.The EU-funded RE-DWELL project will train 15 early-stage researchers (ESRs) in design planning and building, community participation, and policy and financing, providing them with the capacity to operate across fields and sectors, generating innovative solutions for the housing problem in the EU.

ACT combines architectural education, urban conflict theory, peace education principles and social psychology’s contact hypothesis to examine whether thinking about space and the city can mitigate conflict-induced biases between adversarial groups and create the basis for policies involving shared spaces, infrastructures and the public realm within a divided city. Consequently, ACT explores the act of design and urban planning as a conflict transformational process; it is a pedagogic research project which aims at the integration of different approaches to urban conflict issues, from both the social and the spatial sciences, through pedagogic innovation and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It aims at establishing a platform of collaboration to address conflict challenges faced by contemporary cities from a multidisciplinary perspective. The key objective of the project is to develop an innovative system of teaching urban conflict transformation, bridging across research and institutional boundaries in educational cultures, through the act of design and the development and use of digital resources.

SUGAR aims to develop innovative best-practice protocols and guidelines on Sustainable Urban Governance and specifically Public Participation through Augmented Reality.  The project’s key activities include: research in urban governance, augmented reality and public participation to develop a Sustainable Urban Governance framework through AR specifically designed for implementation in the Cypriot context and use of an ‘experimental research’ framework through design thinking to implement, coordinate and monitor such a participatory planning model through a workshop format in Cyprus facilitated by the entire consortium bringing together the public and planning experts.

EPUM aims at the integration of different, often isolated urban form research and teaching approaches through pedagogic innovation and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It aims to develop an innovative, open and inclusive system of teaching and training in urban form from a multidisciplinary perspective, which is capable of enabling the current and future generation of planning and design professionals to address comprehensively and effectively the variety of issues and challenges faced by contemporary cities.