by Jonas Bylund, member of the JPI Urban Europe Management Board, Research and Innovation Officer
The Scientific Advisory Board reflects upon urban transitions pathways
The JPI Urban Europe Scientific Advisory Board met in Leipzig, kindly hosted by the UFZ Helmholtz, to discuss and draw conclusions from the very rich material generated at the Urban Transitions Pathways Symposium 2016.
Urban sustainable development is currently a relatively fragmented landscape of activities and initiatives, at times with different approaches being counter-productive towards each other and so-called ‘wicked issues’ risk emerging. Therefore JPI Urban Europe organised a symposium with the explicit challenge of how to ‘connect the dots’ in this landscape.
Following the Urban Transitions Pathways Symposium 2016, the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) recommends among other things that:
- A longer-term programme to strategically address the interconnections and promote hybrids were relevant. The strategy should avoid boiling it down to one model or approach, but orient itself more towards how to increase connectivity and communication between approaches.
- Tackling this fragmentation also means that JPI Urban Europe supports transnational policy frameworks on sustainable urbanisation, particularly the UN Agenda 2030 SDGs, UN Habitat III New urban Agenda, and EU Urban Agenda.
- Since urban R&I is rich with ideas and workable solutions, what is now urgently needed is capacity building on public administrations / public service innovation and in urban innovation ecosystems to tap the full potential in the landscape.
- Furthermore, fragmented (technological) approaches requires a strategy on the nexus of governance, participation, trust, and knowledge management and integration.
