The TURAS project (Transitioning towards Urban Resilience and Sustainability) was a five-year, EU-funded initiative designed to help European cities and their rural interfaces build resilience and transition toward sustainability. It achieved this by creating visions, feasible strategies, spatial scenarios, and guidance tools through an innovative collaborative approach.
🎯 Key Objectives and Collaborative Approach
The core challenge addressed by TURAS was developing positive transition strategies and scenarios to enable cities to meet complex “grand challenges” like climate change, population shifts, and economic disturbance.
The TURAS Twinning Concept
A central and innovative feature of TURAS was its multiple twinning approach (illustrated in Figure 1 of the report summary). This design brought together:
- Academic Researchers
- Local Authorities (Decision Makers)
- SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises)
This structure ensured that research and development were oriented towards the most significant, real-world sustainability and resilience challenges facing the participating cities. This collaborative approach, which was considered “risky” at the time of the proposal, has since been adopted as a requirement in many Horizon 2020 calls, demonstrating TURAS’s pioneering role in the research arena.
TURAS City Network
The project involved eleven local authorities (including six European capital cities: Brussels, Dublin, London, Rome, Sofia, Ljubljana) and other regional cities (Nottingham, Málaga, Rotterdam, Stuttgart, Aalborg), representing a broad geographic and challenge spectrum across eleven European countries, plus an academic, local authority, and SME from Taiwan.
🛠️ Main Results and Work Package Contributions
The project’s outcomes were developed across seven interconnected research and development (RTD) work packages (Diagram 1 in the report summary), all focused on building resilience into urban planning and design:
- Work Package 1 (ICT Infrastructure): Developed a WebGIS database and G-ICT tool (e.g., a “Resilience Dashboard,” ‘geowiki’, and crowd-sourced mapping applications) to facilitate communication, data access, and community engagement at the sub-city/neighbourhood scale.
- Work Package 2 (Green Infrastructure): Focused on reducing the urban ecological footprint through public and private green infrastructure. Key outputs include the ‘urban green living room’ (a novel 3-D green wall system and mobile demonstrator), green infrastructure guidelines for local authorities, and experimental facilities (e.g., the ‘beetle bump’ and green roofs).
- Work Package 3 (Planning and Design): Developed transition strategies and scenarios for improved planning and urban industrial regeneration, including a compendium of case studies to capture innovation not documented in peer-reviewed literature.
- Work Package 4 (Adaptive Governance/Climate-Neutral Infrastructure): Created an analytical-policy framework for strategic urban planning and various tools for a-priori assessment of resilience measures, such as the HEAT Atlas (for energy planning) and models for assessing green roof potential and flood consequences.
- Work Package 5 (Urban Sprawl): Developed regulations and guidelines to manage urban sprawl, favoring the compact city approach. Research findings and modeling were accepted by the planning authorities in Sofia, leading to new policies being discussed and formulated.
- Work Package 6 (Economic Resilience): Reframed “Short Circuit Economies” into Sustainable and Resilient Economic Activity Locally (SREAL). Key outcomes include a database of Product-Service-Systems (PSS) business models and the development of an incubator model (iAgri). This work led to the spin-off company OSMOS.
- Work Package 7 (Integrated Strategies): A cross-cutting package that combined the outcomes of WPs 2-6 to produce an Integrated Transition Strategy (ITS) and a methodology to guide other European cities in creating their own strategies.
📈 Impact and Legacy
Economic and Societal Impact
- SME Benefit: The project had a strong impact on participating SMEs and fostered the creation of two new spin-off companies (including OSMOS), fulfilling the call’s expectation to create beneficial economic impact and involve SMEs strongly.
- Policy Integration: The co-design approach ensured high relevance, ownership, and the seamless integration of outcomes into the policies and practices of the local authority partners.
Dissemination and Toolkit
TURAS created a decision-maker toolkit on its legacy website, which is a “one-stop show” for stakeholders. It consists of four interconnected sections:
- Integrated Transition Strategies (ITS): A step-by-step “how to” process.
- TURAS Tools: 33 tools for achieving the transition towards resilience (two of which have become stand-alone companies).
- TURAS Place-Based Strategies: Examples of transitioning tested in TURAS cities.
- Pilot Demonstrations: Examples of successful pilot projects.
