The JPI Urban Europe annual symposium “Urban Transitions Pathways” took place on 6 October 2020, and set out to explore and contribute to the DUT public consultation by asking critical questions on urban transitions. Participants from research and academia worked on the “Big Leap forwards in Urban Transitions” that is emerging from our consultation process: How might the research and scientific community prepare for this?

“Principal global problems such as biodiversity decline, climate change, food and water security, energy supply, public health, and social justice are not only wicked, but essentially urban…”
(Wolfram, M. Borgström, S, & Farrelly, M. (2019) ‘Urban transformative capacity: From concept to practice’, Ambio online 22 March 2019; no pagination)

Symposium point of departure
JPI Urban Europe is part of proposing an ‘urban partnership’ in Horizon Europe, the EU framework programme on research and innovation 2021–2027. The partnership focuses on Driving Urban Transitions and presents dilemmas and challenges to be tackled to realise and support urban transformations towards sustainable and liveable futures.

Despite turbulence and disruption characterising 2020 so far, the work on making this partnership as challenge-driven as possible moves on. During multi-actor stakeholder consultations and dialogues (see e.g. invitation to co-design a programme on urban transitions) the symposium needs to process the wealth of input and material around themes and priorities of challenges to tackle in the coming seven years. The timing was set as a warm-up and to suss out take aways for the JPI Urban Europe Policy Conference ‘Stepping up the game – Driving Urban Transitions’ which took place in November 2020.

In collaboration with the Centre for Facilitation, participants in the symposium could explore and give suggestions for some of the dilemmas, paradigms and concept shifting
facing us in the urban transition process:

– How do we tackle some of the fundamental power imbalances?
– How can we create Transdisciplinary research funding calls?
– How can we mobilise and inspire our academic and scientific
colleagues to engage with the programme?

>> For questions about JPI Urban Europe’s symposium, please contact Jonas Bylund: jonas.bylund@jpi-urbaneurope.eu