News & Events

Could Covid-19 prove a turning point in the fight against homelessness? The second URBACT-UIA web conference on the right to housing engaged cities to find out.

With summer officially upon us, the UIA team has got some interesting readings for you! To get you prepped for the best summer ever, we selected for you 7 articles among the newly published ones. In this list, you will also discover a new reading experience through UIA experts’ web articles.

With now 86 projects generating knowledge while implementing their innovative solutions, facilitating an effective process of knowledge transfer and creating the environment and opportunities for capturing and sharing UIA experience are strategic objectives for the initiative.

While the design of the European Urban Initiative (EUI), as described in Commission’s Explanatory Memo - European Urban Initiative post-2020, is entering into a more decisive phase and the capitalisation on UIA’s experience is an important element of its intervention logic, the UIA Steering Committee adopted the UIA Knowledge Management Strategy in May 2020.

11 new projects have been selected in the framework of the 5th UIA Call for Proposals. As in previous calls, the competition among cities has been particularly intense with 222 proposals received, from 23 Member States.

The introductory paper provides background to the web conference “No one left behind”, the second in a series on “Cities Engaging in the Right to Housing” and part of a one-year joint learning activity between UIA and URBACT.

The one-year knowledge activity led by the UIA on urban mobility issues builds on the experience of five UIA funded projects in Albertslund, Lathi, Ghent, Toulouse, Szeged to explore the challenges and opportunities faced by Urban Authorities (UA) when dealing with innovative tools and approaches. The following article gives an overview of the first results and findings of the UIA capitalisation workshop, which gather cities that currently implement mobility innovative solutions. It focuses on data, and discuss how UIA projects deal with data as a resource to support sustainable mobility strategies. This article is a summary of the first part of the final Mobility Report, jointly written by UIA expert Zsuzsanna Kravalik, the UIA Secretariat and the above-mentioned cities.

UIA projects are designed to go beyond traditional policies and services – they need to be bold and innovative. In that context, the monitoring and evaluation of such interventions presents its own set of challenges. Monitoring and evaluation of results is indeed a big challenging task and a number of urban authorities are using the opportunities offered by UIA, in terms of flexibility and availability of financial resources, to go one step beyond.

Collaborative housing models that put residents' needs before private profit are raising standards in affordable and adequate housing. They are part of a broader portfolio of housing solutions for ‘cities engaging in the right to housing’ – the theme of a series of three webinars jointly organised by URBACT and Urban Innovative Actions (UIA).

A big thank you to our external experts who worked hard during the pandemic and finalised all assessments on time.