E-Magazine

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

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We are delighted to introduce you the first e-zine issue of our Erasmus+ project UniverCity Action Lab (UCITYLAB), the joint initiative of a European consortium of higher education institutions – Porto Business School, University of Ljubljana, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Institut Mines-Télécom – and UIIN to foster university- city collaborations to tackle urban challenges.

What is in?

Our first issue aims to highlight the motivations and the vision of the project, as well as shedding light into the institutional motivations of the partner organisations in joining this change initiative. The issue is also enriched with input from our supported Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance projects WEXHE & PEOPLE, recent reports and upcoming events relevant to the theme, presented for your attention.

The selected articles from our partner institutions reflect urgency in action, in addressing pressing societal challenges with novel ways of urban engagement, including forming of local stakeholder communities and setting-up relevant educational activities. Universities are called for adopting interdisciplinary models of teaching and research, and incorporating problem-based learning experiences in their curriculum that will require involvement of the city actors to co-create solutions.

While the consortium commits to the common goals of the project, our articles show our partner institutions have their local and organisational priorities to achieve over the course of their collaboration as well. These unique elements are stated as e.g. increasing of awareness among the
academics on the complexity of technological and societal change, innovation in service and product development with inclusion of citizens, development of new business models in accordance with the potential new solutions, and formation of sub-thematic urban research groups.

We wish you all a pleasant reading and plenty of inspiration for your own university- city collaboration initiatives.

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