School achieves major success with FP7 Bid– TURaS
(18/10/2011)
In March 2011 the School received word from the European Commission (DG Research and Innovation) that a team from GPEP led by Prof. Zorica Nedovic-Budic had been successful in an ambitious EU FP7 application, with a flawless score of 15/15. This new Project, named TURaS (Transitioning to Urban Resilience and Sustainability) was awarded funding of €6.8m (and the total project is just under €9m). It sees UCD GPEP leading, along with 27 partners across Europe, a five year research project, beginning in November 2011, that specifically looks at novel mechanisms for urban social and ecological adaptability. The TURaS Project will bring together researchers, local authorities, SMEs, and local communities and neighbourhoods to research, develop, demonstrate and disseminate transition strategies and scenarios to enable European cities and their rural interfaces to build vitally-needed resilience in the face of significant sustainability challenges. The TURaS Project will use a unique twinning approach, bringing together decision makers in local authorities with SMEs and academics – driven by community stakeholders. Eleven local authorities or local development agencies are involved as project partners and they will orient research and development from the outset towards the most significant sustainability and resilience challenges facing their cities. Nine leading academic research institutions and eight SMEs will work with these public sector bodies helping them to reduce their urban ecological footprint through proposing new visions, feasibility strategies, spatial scenarios and guidance tools to help cities address these challenges. The specific challenges addressed in TURaS include: climate change adaptation and mitigation, natural resource shortage, and community participation in areas such as temporary usage of derelict sites and buildings. TURaS is an ambitious and broad reaching project, and will be supported by innovative ICT infrastructure and a new approach to underlying communication processes. The impact of these new approaches will be measured and results compared between participating cities before a final set of strategies and tools will be developed for demonstration, dissemination and exploitation in other European cities. SMEs are highly involved in all work packages of the project and specific measures have been put in place to ensure the optimal economic impact of the project is achieved. In total eleven European countries are represented in the Project.
See TURaS website: www.turas-cities.org