In addition to the pilot research projects on "Heat Waves in European Cities" and on "Retrofitting Historical Buildings", two new seed research projects related to Sustainable Cities and Communities are established:
- Reducing the adverse effects of natural disasters: This project focuses on reducing the risks linked to anthropogenic climate change and urban sprawl via multidisciplinary perspectives, novel geomatics, and artificial intelligence technologies;
- Legal and Socio-Political Dimensions of Urban Sustainability: This project focuses on urban sustainability from a legal and social-science perspective. Rethinking and reorganising for green social policies and welfare – social sustainability – is thus both a crucial task and a major challenge;
A PhD Network is established to foster research excellence within the EC2U Alliance. This network gathers the expertise of PhD supervisors and jointly supervised PhD students within the VISCC , bringing them together through physical, blended and virtual mobilities to create a community of multidisciplinary experts in SCC.
International Summer/Winter schools and training workshops are used to share knowledge within EC2U and to reach out to the multidisciplinary scientific community in this field. Topics may include Building Sustainable Reuse or Geospatial Data Science for Sustainability, continuing and extending successful activities initiated during the previous funding period of EC2U. Links with clusters of research excellence at all partner universities/cities (e.g., ELLIS Unit Jena on Machine-Learning for Earth system sciences) are leveraged in order to offer cutting-edge training opportunities.
Joint hybrid events within the "EC2U Sustainable Campus Network" will be organised: building upon the existing vibrant local networks of partner universities and their respective cities, the SCC Virtual Institute continues creating campuses that form a living, accessible component of the city structures, promoting sustainability.
Learn more about the Virtual Institute for Sustainable Cities and Communities