The EUniverCities project wants to address the urban challenges in and around ten medium-sized European cities which share a common interest in developing and strengthening the co-operation between the city and university.

Cities and universities increasingly realise that they can benefit both from more strategic and effective forms of co-operation. This network takes an integrative perspective, covering several aspects of the city-university nexus. Most European cities have established some form of partnership between city and university already, but they diverge highly in level, scope, approach and effectiveness. This implies that there is a large potential for cross-city learning.

Partners in the project can learn a lot from each other's strong points and innovative approaches. Also, the project helps cities to take a step further and develop more strategic, comprehensive approaches and involve stakeholders in a better way. The network offers an opportunity to deepen our knowledge on effective approaches in an emerging field.

 

There are many interdependencies and areas of common interest between city and university.

However, in 2,5 years period, we cannot claim to cover each and every aspect. Therefore, based on the baseline study and the challenges of the cities identified, we choose three core themes and one cross-cutting theme.

Theme 1) Creating "Living Labs" where students/researchers help to solve real-life problems and challenges of actors in the urban society & economy. For this to materialise, organised matching structures are needed. Some cities in the partnerschip have ample experience in this field.

Theme 2) Enhancing urban attractiveness for (international) students and knowledge workers. This theme includes collaboration between city and university with respect to internationalisation, place making, improving "urban hospitality" for students and knowledge workers, but also joint marketing.

Theme 3) Promoting urban economic development in a regional context. This includes the promotion of science-based entrepreneurship, technology transfer, and valorisation, not only in technical studies. The regional dimension (collaboration in the region with surrounding cities, villages and regional governments) is a key element in this theme.

Theme 4) Cross-cutting theme of Governance: how to develop an effective partnership? How to get a partnership started, find a common agenda and make it work? How to align different interests and agendas, how to deal with tensions and conflicts? This cross-cutting topic is relevant for all cities, but particularly pressing for cities without a tradition of strategic city-university partnership.

For each of the themes, the project wants to:

- Explore how to create synergies and innovative fruitful university-city
connections
- Exchange and learn about types of co-operations and platforms currently
  in place in the partners cities
- Exchange and learn about how to effectively involve relevant actors in
  various co-operation types
- Identify international best-practices and their success factors
- Translate the results of the transnational exchange to the local level,
  to improve policy making in each of the partner cities 
 

What motivates you to be part of the URBACT adventure?

URBACT is an important platform for cities and stakeholders to learn from each other. We find it exciting to optimize the added value of knowledge exchange between cities on a European level: to let people share knowledge in a good atmosphere, and to help cities to achieve concrete results on the local level.

Who would you like to benefit from the work achieved in your project?

Any city with a university or higher education institute; any higher education institute with the ambition to play a positive role, integrative role in the city. Local, regional, national and EU policymakers involved in issues such as innovation, knowledge economy, technology transfer etc.