This project brings together academic and societal partners from 4 ECIU institutes, building on established collaboration with focus on societal transformation, citizen engagement, viable and smart cities. ECIU-UTC is drawing on a palette of local and regional challenges that are jointly defined with societal partners in Norrköping/Linköping, Stavanger, Enschede, and Barcelona, aiming to achieve SDG11 – sustainable cities and communities, and to the ECIU ‘SuperBlock of Covadonga’ challenge.

To accelerate transformations towards just and sustainable future cities across Europe, local and regional projects need to scale up and share sustainability pathways and planning efforts.  Promising new technologies have created a deluge of interdisciplinary projects focusing mostly on local-scale solutions. While many have been heralded with success, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the potential for reproducing methodologies, processes, and tools in different cultural and geographic settings. The vision of the ECIU-UTC consortium is to design an ECIU virtual testbed - a Distributed Living Lab, aiming to strengthen the capacities of initiatives for urban sustainability transformations through cross- ase learning. This seed project expands existing research and innovation initiatives of the ECIU by linking established living labs and citizen science projects run by partners and their regional ecosystems through four collaborative workshops, resulting in a Roadmap for the Distributed Living Labs as well as a cross-case and collaborative learning communities.

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