The InCITIES project works towards inclusive, sustainable and resilient cities

The European Union’s Horizon-Europe-funded project InCITIES – Trailblazing Inclusive, Sustainable and Resilient Cities started in October 2022. The project hopes to pave the way towards implementing the European Universities Campus by directly contributing to cross-border cooperation and enhancing skills within the InCITIES consortium to address grand societal challenges in Europe.

The InCITIES consortium is formed by partners of the PIONEER Alliance, which addresses the challenges of urban development. Laurea University of Applied Sciences is a member of the PIONEER Alliance together with four other European higher education institutions. 

The other members of the InCITIES consortium, in addition to Laurea, are Université Gustave Eiffel from France, ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon from Portugal, TH Köln from Germany and the University of Zilina from Slovakia. The associated partners of the project include, for example, Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council and the City of Porvoo from Finland. 

Climate change and urban development challenges need to be addressed

The InCITIES project’s main goal is to foster the transformation and modernisation of the partner universities and their ecosystems with a focus on cities’ needs. The partners want to build and strengthen a long-term network of universities and surrounding ecosystem actors based on the formation of integrated knowledge HUBs to mobilise local, regional and national investments in synergy with EU funding opportunities.

The project also aims to build capacity and strengthen the pathway to excellence with integrated knowledge HUBs. To enhance scientific and technological capacity, it is important to share the best available pedagogical, research, management and administrative practices in the consortium, connecting staff and disciplines together. 

The InCITIES project focuses on promoting digitally driven universities by creating an open and innovative education and training platform. This utilises the synergy with the project R&I&D agenda, focused on inclusive, sustainable and resilient (ISR) cities.

Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities and experiences climate change and urban development challenges. These challenges need to be addressed by utilising renewed governance models enabling the capacity to create inclusive, sustainable and resilient cities. In other words, cities require governance models relying on social sciences and humanities, engineering and data sciences to develop technological and social innovation, which includes organisational and business innovation. 

"More than half of the world’s population lives in cities and experiences climate change and urban development challenges."

A multidisciplinary collaborative approach is paramount to solving grand challenges, such as climate change, urban development and resource shortage. Working in this direction, and to realise the European excellence initiative, particularly the European universities initiative, InCITIES will provide a unique opportunity for strengthening the role of the higher education sector in developing ISR cities in Europe.

Laurea’s Learning by Developing learning model piloted in Slovakia and Portugal

The coordinator of the InCITIES project is ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon from Portugal. Laurea is responsible for the work package in the project that includes actions towards equality, diversity and inclusion.  The aim is to create guidelines supporting institutional change through inclusive gender equality plans and to collaborate on a similar equality, diversity and inclusion plan among HEI InCITIES partners.

In addition, Laurea’s pedagogical model Learning by Developing (LbD) is utilised to support capacity-building actions in the project. Laurea focuses on the deployment and scalability design for the LbD activities. The objective is to co-create a shared understanding of what is meant by LbD in the consortium.

The LbD model will be piloted in Slovakia with the University of Zilina and in Portugal with Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon. Laurea is responsible for planning and leading these pilots. 

The project InCITIES receives funding from the European Excellence Initiative (EEI), under the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON), under grant agreement No. 101071330. Five partners from Portugal, Slovakia, Germany, France and Finland will carry out this project. The Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon (Portugal) leads the project consortium, and the partners of the project include the University of Zilina (Slovakia), TH Köln (Germany), Université Gustave Eiffel University (France) and Laurea University of Applied Sciences (Finland).

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