Port Cities can be seen as multidimensional laboratories where challenges connected with urban mobility are more complex due to the dual system of gravity centre: the city, the port, not to mention their shared hinterland.These peculiarities are at once a challenge and an opportunity, as they provide scope for planning, researching and implementing integrated mobility solutions in distinctively complex urban contexts. Civitas PORTIS designs, demonstrates and evaluates integrated sets of sustainable mobility measures in 5 major port cities located on the North Sea (Aberdeen and Antwerp), the Mediterranean Sea (Trieste), the Black Sea (Constanta), and Baltic Sea (Klaipeda). The project also involves a major international follower port city on the East China Sea (Ningbo). Thanks to the Civitas Initiative, the partner cities expect to prove that more efficient and sustainable mobility is conducive to the establishment of vital and multi-modal hubs for urban, regional, national and International movements of passengers and goods. To do this, they establish integrated living laboratories clustering local measures according to four major aspects of sustainable urban mobility: 1. Governance: to increase port-city collaborative planning and participation, leading to enhanced forms of SUMPs. 2. People: to foster less car-dependent mobility styles, leading to modal shift in favour of collective and more active transport. 3. Transport system: to strengthen the efficiency of road traffic management to/from the port and through the city, and foster the use of clean vehicles. 4. Goods: to enhance logistics and freight transport, improving the efficiency and coordination of city, port and regional freight movements. Working with port cities, Civitas PORTIS will generate a strong and twofold replication potential: 1) specifically to other port cities, and 2) more generally to cities presenting major transport nodes and attractors for the benefit of the whole CIVITAS Initiative.

The UN and UNESCO define education as a vital tool in developing ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) to a global phenomenon. In Europe this has been taken into account in curriculums widely but too often ESD is considered as an ‘add on’. Instead it should be a natural and essential part of school culture in order to educate students towards a sustainable way of life. There were four schools taking part in the ECORoad project, from Finland, Great Britain, Iceland and Belgium. Each of the selected partner schools have been committed to ESD for many years and they were well known for this work within their local communities. Each school also had a local specialist partner for supporting the schools' work to implement ESD. The ultimate target for ECORoad was to change pupils’, families’ and the whole community’s way of life to a more sustainable one. During the project we focused to improve each participating school’s culture to enable and support teachers work and school’s daily life within ESD. Through local and international trainings teachers learned new skills and developed their practices in designing and delivering ESD for their pupils. In addition to the local goals, the project wanted to influence the wider audience by producing a booklet, “Roadmap to an ESD school”. There were five project meetings, four of which focused on a specific area of school culture. Based on theories we divided school culture into four parts 1) Professional orientation, 2) Organizational structure (leadership and management), 3) Teaching and learning and 4) Student-centered focus. Before each project meeting there was self evaluation for the staff about the current practice in the specific area of school culture. During the meetings schools shared the results of their self-evaluations- their strengths and areas for development- and, in consultation with their partner schools and specialist partners, drew up an action plan with three targets for development. These targets were then implemented at school and the outcomes shared at the following project meeting. This kind of working methodology was good and it structured the development tasks into smaller parts. Between project meetings ECORoad also organized four teachers’ trainings into different aspects of ESD. Those themes were 1) Health and wellbeing of our establishment, 2) Outdoor education, 3) Living to learn or learning to live and 4) School's ecological daily life. Each participating school organized one training together with their specialist organization. Training programs included workshops of different methodology of ESD, job shadowing, visiting different schools and nature activities. After each teachers' training week there was an organized survey for participants and the feedback was very positive. Teacher trainings were useful for the whole project, because after the training sessions more participants felt ownership for the ECORoad project. We produced and published a booklet, ‘A Roadmap to an ESD School’ to encourage and support other schools to embrace ESD. The booklet is a comprehensive guide on how to develop a school culture which supports ESD based on our own journey. The booklet is universal and contains practical instructions and questionnaires. It was printed for the dissemination events, but it is freely downloadable from the ECORoad project’s homepage at https://ecoroad.weebly.com/. The ECORoad project had objectives for four different target groups: pupils, teachers, project schools and other schools nearby and far. Based on surveys and self-evaluations implemented in the project, it can be seen that ECORoad has influenced the school culture for implementing sustainable development. The surveys made at the beginning and at the end of the project showed that the awareness of sustainable development among staff in project schools had increased and that pupils got more school experiences related to the theme of sustainable development. Examples how we improved our school culture and practical examples of activities made by pupils can be seen in the booklet “Roadmap to an ESD School”. During and now at the end of project each participant has developed their own dissemination plan e.g. consultations, presentations, articles. The main message in dissemination events has been 1) education has important role for promoting sustainable development, 2) the school culture affects how sustainable development is implemented in teaching and school’s daily life and 3) “Roadmap to an ESD school” shows some of our steps to be taken toward ESD school. There are still many possibilities to improve ESD in project schools, but it can be said that these schools are now ESD centres of excellence in their own area. ESD is now more integrated into the school culture and the project has ensured that ESD is not a passing project in these participating schools but now embedded in their core values.

In SCALE-UP 3 advanced urban nodes Antwerp, Madrid and Turku, team up around 1 main goal: develop data-driven and user centric strategies to accelerate the take-up of smart, clean and inclusive mobility, by means of well-connected and multi-usage urban nodes, to the level needed to meet EU climate and transport objectives. To reach the main goal, 5 strategic objectives are defined: - Improve multi-level and multi-stakeholder governance enabling seamless multimodal transport across urban nodes - Develop (inter)connected and multimodal nodes for passengers and freight as a backbone of a resilient mobility system, including network optimisations -Develop data driven mobility strategies and tools to stimulate seamless multimodal transport of passengers and freight and optimise network capacity across the wider urban area - Provide access to inclusive clean and safe mobility solutions - Change travel behaviour focussing on clean, active and healthy modes of transport The 5 objectives relate to fields of intervention in which the SCALE-UP urban areas excel and deliver valuable output by implementing 28 mobility measures scaled to the FUA and taking into account the TEN-T dimension. Furthermore a strong framework for thematic policy validation amongst SCALE-UP experts guarantees a meaningful cooperation between the 3 urban areas, internal capacity building and mutual exchange and learning. A 6th strategic objective (TAKE UP) defines how the project delivers evidence of the effectiveness of the different actions in relation to EU climate and transport targets, and how it accelerates the take-up of these solutions amongst and beyond SCALE-UP urban areas. The evaluation framework with proven EU record, provides evidence of the impact. Moreover the data driven approach pays special attention to how new digital mobility solutions yield new datasets. These offer new insights and feed the evaluation framework resulting in a more evidence- based policy development.

"Over the last ten years, Euroscepticism has become visible and stable through the public opinion in European Member States. The European Parliament stated that: • The future of Europe starts in towns and with citizens; • Local authorities are best positioned to fight against populism – through implementation of projects. The ""Pop-Up Europe Delivering Europe to its citizens"" project fits the statement of the European Parliament by providing training to staff members involved in EU policy on how to organise activities and awareness at local level for the general public and how to motivate people to become active European citizens. The training has addressed the staff of the four Municipalities involved and/or public administrators of local authorities. The direct beneficiaries have been personnel working in European Offices of Municipalities. Although there is plenty of training for public officials on European topics to be carried out at national level, literature shows a very limited existence of projects allowing sharing of experiences between Municipalities offices dealing with European union matters. The methodology used by the project is a results-oriented one. Informal training and on the job training are the best learning techniques in adult education. Participants in the training have exchanged their experiences in the information and awareness raising campaigns on European topics and they have sudied a best practice, which is the Pop Up Europe experience led by the Province of Antwerpen, winner of the Europcom ""European Public Communication Award"" in 2017. By organising joint short term training staff meetings, personnel working in municipalities got the chance to learn from each other and adapt the Pop-up tools to their local context organiseng Pop Up events. The results during the project and on its completion are: Promote good practices in terms of local governance and support the exchange of experiences between European offices of local authorities. Strengthen project partners EU-related governance skills Fight distrust and lack of cooperation among key actors in local community Engage directly local governments and citizens to best learn of, grasp opportunities and meet the challenges that the EU integration implies. Besides the empowerment of staff in Municipalities the Pop Up project has delivered a specific tool-kit freely available to all European municipalities in five languages (Italian, English, Latvian, Portuguese and Flemmish): 12 recipes for municipalities to get a taste of Europe which is a recipe book for municipalities. Each recipe guides through the various stages of developing activities and events on the European Union. It provides municipalities with information material, graphic designs and inspiration…in other words everything someone needs to start communication about Europe!"

<< Objectives >>By implementing this project, we want to develop a new methodology for the waste management of European parks, by collecting and disseminating good practices and producing an innovative handbook; increase the educating competencies of the partner organizations in how to enable behavior change and increase the awareness of the users of the parks; and increase the awareness and behavioral change concerning waste by the users of the parks and other stakeholders.<< Implementation >>Project partners will participate in four transnational staff trainings, and organize multiplier events, one in each country, for their stakeholders. Several urban parks will be visited in four countries, and their waste management will be analyzed and improved. The consortium will develop an innovative handbook ZERO WASTE URBAN PARKS that can be used by managers of other European green spaces to implement zero-waste projects and to work on behavior change of their users.<< Results >>The project will raise the level of competencies and skills of the adult learners, to be successful innovators and communicators in zero-waste projects for urban green spaces. Participants will become zero-waste experts in their own organizations and their national and international networks. The general end result is cleaner European parks and cities.