Dear community members,

Welcome to the summer edition of the CoP-CITIES newsletter! 

In this release, we highlight the JRC's participation in the Brussels Urban Summit, present a new JRC publication on slums and informal settlements in Europe, and give space to news from several community partners. If you are curious to know more, have a look at the next sections!

We are happy to confirm our participation in the European Week of Region and Cities (EWRC) next October in Brussels, with a session entitled ‘A fairer future for European cities: navigating urban inequalities and vulnerabilities’. The session, organised in partnership with DG REGIO, will take place on 10^th October, from 14:30 to 16:00 in the SQUARE. More details about the agenda will follow, but we can already anticipate the participation of speakers from different organisations, including Sciences Po and the city of Rotterdam. We hope to see many of you there, in order to make the discussion fruitful and rich. 

Next to that, we plan to host our annual CoP-CITIES plenary meeting as a side event during the EWRC. Stay tuned for our September newsletter when we will announce more details on the plenary meeting date and content as well as let you discover the speakers invited to our main session.

For now, we wish you a good continuation of summer and a nice holiday break and we reconnect in September, recharged with new energy. As usual, do not hesitate to reach out to us to flag any initiatives and activities that can be of interest to our community. 

The newsletter editorial board

Patrizia Sulis, Sjoerdje van Heerden, Silvia Iodice