On 29 September 2020, participants from a variety of JPI Urban Europe supported projects gathered online to exchange, learn and connect around their findings. The day included the final event for ENSUF projects and launched the ENSUF results catalogue. Panellists from ICLEI and the European Commission reflected on the outcome and encouraged the diverse projects’ findings. JPI Urban Europe will continue to promote and support findings and policy briefs from projects in all calls. You can now access the concept board snapshots from event, where projects worked before, during and after the event with their findings.

Through joint calls, JPI Urban Europe continuously expands its portfolio of ongoing and completed research- and innovation projects. To achieve the maximum value from the funded projects and integrate results to strategic areas and policy developments, JPI Urban Europe has developed formats and routines for a continuous and dedicated programme management. This way, the program has in the past years come to grow into a community of many hundreds of researchers and practitioners all over Europe that exchange results and insights across projects, calls and countries. Projects supported in JPI Urban Europe benefit from established strategies on results dissemination and exploitation and are active contributors to larger recurring events and arenas. Projects in ERA-NET Smart Urban Futures had the (so far) highest number of involved stakeholders, for example a totalt of 76 activley engaged cities with a large geographical scope.

The projects meeting on 29 Sep started with the official launch of the ENSUF Project Results Catalogue. JPI Urban Europe presented some key monitoring results and examples from the projects in the catalogue. Thereafter, participants got to hear some of the ENSUF projects pitch their results and impact highlights. What can be the ENSUF legacy for smart urban futures? With inspiration from the projects’ pitches and the results catalogue launch, panellists from JPI Urban Europe, ICLEI and the European Commission reflected on the impact of R&I projects to cities and urban transformation processes. In the communication keynote and following workshops, projects shared experiences on effectful communication and gave recommendations to both each other and the program for how R&I projects can realise strategic communications ambitions around their findings- also after projects end.

Participants concluded, amongst other things, that:

• It is important to support consortium that are designed to include stakeholders that carry the findings forward and beyond, both during the project and when it “ends”
• Projects can benefit from making themselves intermediaries between policy and inhabitants- and to work for not just policy impact but changes in culture (which can impact policy in the end)
• Projects benefit from developing and anchoring the “how” and capacity building of different sorts to surrounding stakeholders to guarantee continuous usage and benefits of project results
• Good ways to have a wanted impact of your results is to engage in trust building activities between key stakeholders, and co-design strategies for municipalities.
  

With the help of facilitators and online tools like Concept board, participants gathered both before, during and after the event to exchange their results and learnings. Below are snapshots from the projects uploads to the event Concept board. Can you spot a project you wish to connect with? You can also visit the event Concept board here to zoom in and out on specific areas- tick the list-icon to the left and select sections to visit. 

Are you in a JPI Urban Europe supported project? Don’t forget to mention us in social media so we can help share your results! Instagram and Twitter: @JPIUrbanEurope

> Learn more about the ENSUF projects in their result interviews with links to their websites.

> If you have any questions about the event please e-mail caroline.wrangsten@jpi-urbaneurope.eu