JPI Urban Europe is ready to establish as the research and innovation hub for urban transitions and is working with the European Commission on a longer-term programme called “Driving Urban Transitions to a Sustainable Future”. Parts of this programme builds upon the JPI Urban Europe SRIA 2.0. Ever wondered how JPI Urban Europe developed the SRIA 2.0? We have now published a paper in the Urban Transformations journal on how we developed it, called: Joint programming for urban transformations: the making of the JPI Urban Europe Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda.
JPI Urban Europe launched its updated Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) in February 2019. Developed in the field of sustainable urbanisation, it is based on a wide set of sectors, disciplines, research frontiers, and their asymmetrical interconnections, as well as consultations among stakeholders in these areas, ranging from global policy and EU levels over national to regional and local actors including civil servants and politicians, researchers, commercial actors, civil society. Since the international landscape of urban policy and particularly urban transformations has recently been shifting with UN Agenda 2030, UN Habitat New Urban Agenda, and, in Europe, with an Urban Agenda for the EU, urban research and innovation, at least the parts tackling sustainable urbanisation, strives to elaborate how to support these objectives. Together with an account of how this was done from the insider perspective of a programme manager, this note presents questions and issues that will direct the JPI Urban Europe programming beyond 2020. The updated JPI Urban Europe agenda’s main novelty is a dilemma-driven approach to the thematic priorities in the programming activities and a transition arena concept for its implementation.
Keywords: Urban transformations, Communities of practice, JPI urban Europe, Dilemmas, Institutional practice, Knowledge practices, Agenda, Sustainable urbanisation