TURAS

Summary

From 2011 to 2016, TURAS (Transitioning Towards Urban Resilience And Sustainability)  brought 29 partners on a journey of exploration and renewal, a re-examination of how we build resilience in our cities, towns and neighbourhoods. The project connected urban communities, researchers, local authorities, and SMEs to research, develop, and disseminate transition strategies and scenarios enabling European cities and their rural interfaces to build resilience in the face of sustainability challenges. To ensure maximum impact, the TURAS project has developed an innovative twinning approach bringing together decision makers in local authorities with SMEs and academics to ensure meaningful results are implemented. 11 local authorities or local development agencies were partners in the project, prioritising sustainability and resilience challenges facing their cities. 9 leading academic research institutions and 6 SMEs worked with these cities, helping them reduce their urban ecological footprint through proposed visions, feasibility strategies, spatial scenarios and guidance tools to help cities address these challenges. The challenges addressed in TURAS include: climate change adaptation and mitigation; natural resource shortage and unprecedented urban growth.

The Challenge

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).

Outcomes

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.

Funding

The TURAS project received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No 282834.