EU-China Innovation Platform on Sustainable Urbanisation

ended

The key objective of URBAN-EU-CHINA is to develop a robust, evidence-driven bottom-up approach to complement the existing top-down EU-China strategic approach to sustainable urbanisation. This will be accomplished via a coordinated series of actions including: a strategic R&I agenda, scoping and assessment, networking events, peer-to-peer exchanges, benchmarking and monitoring, and joint demonstration projects. By creating tighter coupling between city-level, national, and supra-national programmes, planning, policies, and projects, URBAN-EU-CHINA will yield a significant increase in cooperative EU-CHINA R&I activities. The key barrier addressed by URBAN-EU-CHINA is the disconnect between strategic visions and targets and operational realities of time/resource constraints, language and cultural barriers, differences in planning/policy/ governance framework conditions within European and Chinese cities, and lack of effective bi-directional transmission mechanisms of transferable planning and policy instruments for sustainable urbanisation. The topic ENG-GLOBALLY-08-2016-2017 asks for the creation of an EU-China Innovation Platform on Sustainable Urbanisation. Creating such a platform is complex and cross-sectoral by nature, aiming to engage policy makers, national authorities, industries, cities, academia, civil society and other stakeholders in order to develop more sustainable cities. In URBAN-EU-CHINA, 12 experienced European and Chinese consortium partners from across the sustainable urbanisation value chain join forces to support the European Commission in its aim to make EU-China sustainable urbanisation cooperation more accessible, attractive, and rewarding for a broader set of stakeholders.