#UrbanA has kicked off, get involved, let’s make sustainable and just cities.

3 min readNov 4, 2019

How do we best tackle urban unsustainability & injustice? UrbanA (Urban Arenas for sustainable & just cities) is a 3-year project that aims to answer this challenging question!
(This post was originally posted July 20, 2019 here)

UrbanA is a 3 year European research project (2019–2022) and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. There will be 4 Arenas and a number of “Side Arenas” over the next 3 years, the main arenas will be in Rotterdam (Nov 28,29 2019), Barcelona (June 5th 2020), Berlin (Feb / march 2021), Brussels (oct 2021). The Urban Arenas will be co-creative spaces designed to generate convincing, specific, and actionable solutions towards sustainable cities that foster deep forms of democracy and citizen empowerment.

UrbanA: 4 Urban Arenas in 4 European Cities over next 2 years

Lisbon intends to have 4 Side Arenas, starting November 12 2019 and is currently mapping the territory and talking with local projects and communities in the Lisbon Metropolitian area (AML). The most Up to date map of many (not all) local actors in Lisbon is the CIVICS map https://tinyurl.com/yyx8qu8g — a crowdsourced community led Ibero-American initiaitive, from Madrid based Mapa Civics — Vic Viverodeiniciativasciudadanas — Innovación Ciudadana.

CIVICS map, a crowdsourced community map of citizen initiatives in Lisbon

The UrbanA team is made up of 7 memebers from around Europe:

ICLEI World Secretariat (Local Governments for Sustainability Europe)
ECOLISE (meta netork for European citizen-led initiatives, ecovillages, transition towns, permaculture projects and more)
Central European University Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy Sciences and Policy (Budapest, Hungary)
Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability Sustainability, (BCN UEJ, Barcelona, Spain)
DRIFT — The Dutch Research Institute For Transitions (Rotterdam, The Netherlands)
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg — University of Freiburg’s Chair of Sustainability Governance (Freiburg, Germany)
Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes — ce3c — research lab in FCUL (Lisbon, Portugal)

Aims, outcomes and rationale of UrbanA:

UrbanA takes up the challenge of synthesizing and brokering the knowledge and experience generated in research and innovation projects that deal with approaches tackling urban (un)sustainability and (in)justice, including issues of environmental degradation, climate risks as well as urban inequalities and social exclusion. In this way, UrbanA aims to support city-makers — including policy-makers, activists, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, citizens and other engaged individuals — in designing and transforming European cities into sustainable and just urban and peri-urban environments.

UrbanA uses twitter and insta only (no facebook), for infos of how to get involved, see website https://urban-arena.eu/ or follow hashtag #sustainablejustcities. The callout to be an “UrbanA fellow” has just gone out, along with opportunity to work on this project with the great team memeber DRIFT for transition, who are based in Rotterdam: URBANA fellows public call (Tweet here)

** Further links of interest:

Urbana Social Media: