The UIA Knowledge Management Strategy adopted: a valuable testbed to explore the future EUI components and mechanisms

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.

With the last call for proposals completed and 86 projects generating a constantly growing wealth of thematic and operational knowledge, the focus of UIA for the next years activities naturally shifts towards urban knowledge generation (through project implementation) and its transfer. The UIA Knowledge Management Strategy has been designed to enable this transfer as well as pilot mechanisms and actions that contribute to the definition of the EUI value chain and inspire more generally the preparation of the urban dimension of Cohesion policy 2021/27.

In this context, Anne Wetzel, European Affairs Director of the UIA Entrusted Entity (Region Hauts-de-France) and Normunds Popens, Deputy Director General for Regional and Urban Policy, European Commission, jointly call to action all stakeholders, including UIA cities and experts, URBACT, the Urban Agenda for the EU Partnerships, and pan-European networks to help deliver in the period 2020/23 the UIA Knowledge management strategy.

The UIA Knowledge Management Strategy is the strategic frame within which UIA’s knowledge capitalisation, dissemination and transfer activities are organised. It outlines the ambition concerning knowledge management and the objectives, the main components, the targets and participating stakeholders in the knowledge process, activities and outputs. Two different but highly complementary dimensions of knowledge will be captured and shared with other urban stakeholders in Europe and beyond, i.e. the thematic knowledge and the operational knowledge.

Thematic knowledge and operational knowledge are the building blocks of the UIA Knowledge Management Strategy to inspire and increase the capacity of urban authorities and urban stakeholders in Europe and beyond. These two intentions (inspiring and increasing the capacity of the Cohesion policy community of practitioners and urban stakeholders) will be achieved with:

a mix of different activities of thematic capitalisation: thematic work stream, to gather evidence and good practices on specific topics;
capacity building: studies in order to gather evidence and good practices on specific challenges;
and transfer: design and test of transfer mechanism

Throughout 2020, UIA is running two thematic knowledge activities on housing – Cities engaging in the right to housing - and mobility – Innovation for urban mobility, the way forward - and conducting one study on how to monitor and evaluate innovation. More updates in the article UIA knowledge journey continues: strategy now adopted and current activities progressing.