01 March 2023

Community of Practice on Cities

COP-CITIES Newsletter #16

Dear community members,

Welcome to a new edition of the CoP-CITIES newsletter. As you might notice, the structure and content have been revised to better serve the objective of bilateral exchange and dialogue within the community.

Next to that, we have also launched a new webpage for our community. We hope you will take a bit of time to explore this new environment. If you have not had the chance to migrate your profile from the old website, please take the occasion to recreate it.

As you know, the CoP-CITIES is a shared initiative of DG REGIO and the JRC, bringing together cities, city networks, academia, NGOs and other urban stakeholders to strengthen the knowledge base on urban issues. The CoP-CITIES also offers a place to discuss potential future challenges and opportunities for urban areas, and this new edition of the newsletter aims precisely at that, including also the perspective and work of members outside the Commission.

We hope you will like this initiative and we look forward to hearing your feedback at meeting occasions such as the Cities Forum in Turin on 16-17 March, and the CoP Cities Plenary later this year. Please also feel invited to reach out to us and other community members at any moment in time through our new webpage.

The newsletter editorial board

Highlights

CoP Cities presence at the Cities Forum in March

Our CoP CITIES will have its own stand at the Cities Forum in Turin. Here we will exhibit recent work on cities, while also welcoming all community members to come by for a chat.

Next to that, the B3 Territorial Development Unit of the JRC will be actively present at the Cities Forum 2023 with a session titled ‘The role and challenges of small- and medium-sized urban areas in bringing Europe closer to citizens and driving the green and just transition’. This will be the occasion to launch the new ‘Policy atlas of sustainable urban development for small urban areas’. We will also contribute to the session ‘How can cities build their capacities on sustainable urban development under the European Urban Initiative?’.

date

16/03/2023 - 17/03/2023

Registration

See also

Programme

City Interview: Rosemarie van Ham - ICAR, Rotterdam

Rosemarie van Ham (she/her), Advisor Inclusive Climate Policy & Founder of Inclusive Climate Action Rotterdam (ICAR) at the municipality of Rotterdam, explains why the climate crisis is also a social crisis and that we cannot solve it without tackling poverty, (gender) inequality, and racism.

News from CoP community

The Science for policy report on CityLabs is out!

The report, entitled ‘Space matters: How to develop a common methodology for CityLabs', illustrates the outcomes of an Exploratory Research Activity led by the Territorial Development Unit of the Joint Research Centre between 2021 and 2022, with the aim of developing an up-to-date, modular, and flexible methodology that could be applied to future CityLabs on a variety of topics.

New report on sandboxing and data sharing

This recent JRC report, from our colleagues in T.1 Unit, aims to be a practical guide to adopting innovative solutions for data sharing at the local level by leveraging the sandboxing approach. It is conceived as a practical orientation for a wide range of public administrators who are eager to develop or improve, data ecosystems in their local contexts. The term 'sandbox' refers to an environment that allows us to safely experiment with innovative solutions that allow for an agile and inclusive approach to foster hands-on experience for testing new applications or new organisational approaches.

You can read all about the report here

Nine cities set standards for the transparent use of Artificial Intelligence

Nine cities, cooperating through the Eurocities network, have developed a free-to-use open-source ‘data schema’ for algorithm registers in cities. The data schema, which sets common guidelines on the information to be collected on algorithms and their use by a city, supports the responsible use of AI and puts people at the heart of future developments in digital transformation.

Handbook of Territorial and Local Development Strategies

At the end of 2022, the Handbook of Territorial and Local Development Strategies was launched. It provides valuable knowledge on how to design and implement integrated territorial and local development strategies promoted by EU cohesion policy as relevant tools to sustain this process, in areas other than urban. The Handbook aims to serve managing authorities of operational programmes, local strategy owners as well as other stakeholders involved in the process.

The recording of the event’s web-streaming can be found here

The report can be download from here

Just Urban Transitions – Lessons from UIA cities, new report released!

The Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) has supported 86 projects by cities across the EU that have tested innovative solutions to address environmental and societal urban challenges in an inclusive way to achieve a resilient economy. Following this, the UIA has launched a study analysing the experiences of the UIA cities.

Activities and Events

Next SUD peer-review in Vicenza

The city of Vicenza will host the next Sustainable Urban Development (SUD) peer-review, organised by the JRC in collaboration with DG-REGIO. Peer-reviews are an open and trustful learning environment for discussing how to address challenges around the 2021-2027 urban strategies financed by the cohesion policy. The event will host 50 participants from municipalities across the EU, experts in strategic spatial planning and representative of the EC. The other cities under review will be Šibenik (Croatia), Valencia (Spain) and Banská Bystrica (Slovakia).

date

18/04/2023 - 19/04/2023

CSI call for participation

How can cities best cooperate with scientific institutions and improve evidence-based city science policy-making? This is one of the main questions upon which the City Science Initiative  is based, a city network supported by the JRC, DG Research and Innovation, and DG REGIO.

This is the bi-monthly newsletter of the Community of Practice on Cities.

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