Smart Sustainable Cities (SSC) represent a progression of how cities apply digital technology to serve their populations, pursue sustainable socio-economic development, and transform themselves. The urban development that leads SSC requires a growing number of competencies to work together in order to plan, design, implement and manage the ongoing transformations of the city, enabled by technological innovation. Considering the great attention the concept of SSC has reached in Latin America, our project aims at integrating it into various university courses using new teaching and learning tools, as well as developing new curricula in all levels of education process. Given the increasing number of competencies needed and its interdisciplinary characteristic, the curricula for SSC will be implemented in areas such as ICT, Business Administration, Computer Science, Engineering, Architecture and Urbanism, Urban Planning, Political Science, among others, using a collaborative and international network of selected academic institutions in Latin America and Europe. The main outputs of the project include the development, evaluation and implementation of new courses and programmes on SSC to reach students, policy makers, public managers and other members of the city administration, professionals, managers and entrepreneurs, as well as university faculty that will be trained to apply the developed ICT-based tools to their classes. Besides academic curricula and specialization programmes, the project will provide an e-learning platform filled with a Massive Online Open Course on SSC. The main impacts of the project are to improve the quality of learning and teaching tools, methodologies and pedagogical approaches in the Latin America region, increase the employability and competitiveness of the students, and for the faculty members to increase the quality of their classes by using new learning and teaching tools and new content, as well as promoting life-long learning.

The University of cross-border territories are the place of cultural integration, sharing of know-how, construction of common study programs, promotion of shared growth strategies, strengthening of common identity signs, protection of ethnic and cultural minorities. For these reasons, the development of border areas allows the strengthening of relations and joint programs of universities that insist on frontier territories. NUCIF project is the result of the activities of the REUNIF Network (Network of Border Universities) which has involved a large part of the universities participating in the Project. The REUNIF Network was set up in 2010 after the Tarija Agreement (2006) signed by the universities themselves. The NUCIF project (Network de Universidades para el Conocimiento y la Integración de Frontera), from the European experience in managing cross-border programs of economic development and sharing of research areas, education and knowledge, aimed at promoting construction of a common area of education, university extension and research in cross-border geographical area which includes Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay.Project’s specific objectives area:1. Strengthen cross-borders Universities Network by creating a governance model open to local public institutions and private companies;2. Encourage Universities’ expertise on key issues (agroindustry, environment and climate change, sustainable tourism and cultural property, circular economy) related to trans-border development by building a network platform for local know how dissemination and resources sharing.3. Building and experiment shared curricula in order to support regional integration trans-border development by facilitating and implementing CLAR System in the involved Universities.NUCIF objectives combine in order to determine a concrete change in present situation:1)Cross-borders Network institutionalization and creation of an open governance model which allows to bridge the gap between Universities and society, building good trans-borders cooperation practices starting from companies and society’s requirements and gain efficacy in main social/economical problems solving; 2)Knowledge Hub specialization allows to improve knowledge and research by implementing cooperation among research centers EU/LA on the 4 above mentioned issues. At the same time, the Project aims to disseminate the know how developed through the Knowledge Hubs, by making it available to all stakeholders; 3)Exchange and implementation of CLAR system encourages students and professionals’ mobility, breaks the existing gap among different credits systems, facilitate the contamination among training and professional programs, contribute to reinforce weakest areas. NUCIF Project implemented different actions, through a precise methodology as follow: - Knowledge, skills and practise were transferred and disseminated during international conferences (also via web); training sessions through webinar; academic and research specialization on the 4 main areas though study trips in EU.- For CLAR System adoption the Canteros CLAR and the training-intervention methodology were implemented.- An open source software has been implemented for management, control and evaluation activities, it allowed to monitor every step of the Project;- Dissemination activities were implemented through traditional channels (radio, publications, events.) and on line channels (NUCIF Sharing Platform, Social, webinars).- Creation of four Knowledge Hubs on the key themes of cross-border development to encourage the specialization of universities and the construction of a network platform for the dissemination of know-how to the territory and its stakeholders. The results were shared through the knowledge sharing platform, allowing the know-how accumulated by the KHs from all the territorial areas to be distributed and made available to all the subjects in the network (universities, schools, companies, NGOs).