The UCITYLAB Project consortium greets the autumn season with a new issue of its biannual e-zine, dedicated to highlight project outputs and further explore the university-city engagement landscape in Europe.
Since our last publication in April, great progress has been made from the finalisation of the case study reports, to the development of the first draft of the UCITYLAB Challenge Teaching Toolkit. The project partners have also initiated conversations with their urban stakeholders to set up their regional networks, and ensure commitment during the time of pilot implementation of the teaching toolkit.
This issue of the UCITYLAB e-zine hosts a collection of articles developed from the good practice case study reports, featuring examples of university-city collaborations from Finland, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, and Australia, as well as an international collaborative initiative between the Municipality of Valencia in Spain and the Western Sydney University in Australia. Our selection of articles does not only give insights into the nature of the collaborations, but also provides a sneak peek into the type of activities and impact of the efforts made so far.
Our first impressions into the cases are that the type of collaborations and stakeholder constellations are diverse depending on their targets. The types of engagement range from urban policy research, facilitation of user engagement to public service innovation, and a graduate study programme to the development and testing of technologies for smart cities.
While our selection of articles represents only a fraction of our case study collection, we trust they will give you new perspectives into understanding the current landscape of the university-city collaboration.
We wish you all a pleasant reading.
UCITYLAB CONSORTIUM