Transitioning towards urban resilience and sustainability
“TURAS" is the acronym for the EU funded project ‘Transitioning towards Urban Resilience and Sustainability’. TURAS is also the Gaelic word for ‘journey’. From 2011 to 2016, TURAS brought 29 partners on a journey of exploration and renewal, a re-examination of how we build resilience in our cities, towns and neighbourhoods. This journey, summarised in the final video, brought together communities and neighbourhoods with academic researchers, local authorities, and SMEs to research, develop, demonstrate and disseminate strategies and scenarios to enable European cities and their rural interfaces to transition towards vitally-needed resilience.
The TURAS project started with a very simple question – how to get a small amount of funding for a community garden in Dublin city. This question passed through several minds, a couple of coffee discussions, many emails and phone calls, and then numerous proposal drafts. After a long process of edits and the co-creation of ideas a proposal was sent for evaluation to DG Research and Demonstration (now DG Research and Innovation) in the European Commission. Along the way, it generated interest and commitment among 30 different partner organisations in 11 cities or city regions (Aalborg, Brussels, Dublin City Council, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, Ljubljana, Málaga, Nottingham, Rome, Rotterdam, Sofia, and the Verband Region Stuttgart).
This process culminated in an extremely large and ambitious project launched in October 2011 and officially ending at the end of September 2016. At the heart of this project was the desire to co-create working links between different agencies involved in city-making, with communities at the centre. In the end, TURAS devised over 80 different novel ideas and processes that would enable communities to transition to a more resilient future.
Explore the rich catalogue of results in Oppla's Marketplace and Case Study Finder to build on the experience as part of your own journey towards a more resilient urban environment.
TURAS Tools
33 practical analytical toolkits, process methodologies, community engagement tools and implementation guidelines to help cities respond to a broad range of urban challenges from climate change adaptation through flood management and green infrastructure toolkits to urban sprawl monitoring guidelines to deal with unprecedented urban growth.
Place Based Strategies
The 10 Place Based Strategies presents the experience and lessons learned from 10 TURAS urban regions as they embarked on their TURAS journey combining, adapting, implementing and testing TURAS tools as part of the development and implementation of their own Integrated Transition Strategy.
Integrated Transition Strategies
10 Integrated Transition Projects or ‘Topic-specific’ strategies combine a number of individual TURAS tools in an integrated cross-disciplinary approach to dealing with large scale urban challenges.
Pilots
The 33 TURAS Pilots are exemplary projects that have been implemented in participating TURAS urban regions. The TURAS Pilots describe details of obstacles faced by stakeholders in implementing solutions, resources required, key achievements and insightful testimonials from individual stakeholders.
The TURAS project received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No 282834.