About
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.
Over the five years of the project, the feasibility of these approaches was tested in selected case study neighbourhoods. The project explored new measures to enable adaptive governance, collaborative decision-making, and behavioural change towards resilient and sustainable European cities. SMEs were highly involved in all work packages of the project and specific measures were put in place to ensure the optimal economic impact of the project was achieved.
Outcome
TURAS began by developing a framework and process for developing and using a geospatial information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure at sub-city / neighbourhood scale, featuring relevant contextual as well as project-specific data. In the next phase, case study data were used to develop and test new approaches to build increased urban resilience and reduce the urban ecological footprint of each participating city. Diagram 1 illustrates the connectivity of the different approaches to building urban resilience, which TURAS developed and how the work packages interact together. The final phase of TURAS involved the demonstration, dissemination and exploitation of results. Typology illustrating the six principal RTD work packages of the TURAS Project. All six are interconnected and inter-reliant with each other, and the ultimate focus was to establish mechanisms for building resilience into urban planning and design through integrated transition strategies (Work Package 7).
Work Packages
WP1 - Geospatial ICT - Support Infrastructure for Urban Resilience
WP2 - Greening Public and Private Green Infrastructure
WP3 - Urban/Industrial Regeneration, Land Use Planning and Creative Design
WP4 - Climate Change Resilient City Planning and Climate-neutral Infrastructure
WP5 - Limiting Urban Sprawl
WP6 - Short-circuit Economies
WP7 - Integrated Transition Strategies
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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.