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.

DISTENDER will provide integrated strategies by building a methodological framework that guide the integration of climate change (CC) adaptation and mitigation strategies through participatory approaches in ways that respond to the impacts and risks of climate change (CC), supported by quantitative and qualitative analysis that facilitates the understanding of interactions, synergies and trade-offs. Holistic approaches to mitigation and adaptation must be tailored to the context-specific situation and this requires a flexible and participatory planning process to ensure legitimate and salient action, carried out by all important stakeholders. DISTENDER will develop a set of multi-driver qualitative and quantitative socio-economic-climate scenarios through a facilitated participatory process that integrates bottom-up knowledge and locally-relevant drivers with top-down information from the global European Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and downscaled Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) from IPCC. A cross-sectorial and multi-scale impact assessment modelling toolkit will be developed to analyse the complex interactions over multiple sectors, including an economic evaluation framework. The economic impact of the different efforts will be analyse, including damage claim settlement and how do sectoral activity patterns change under various scenarios considering indirect and cascading effects. It is an innovative project combining three key concepts: cross-scale, integration/harmonization and robustness checking. DISTENDER will follow a pragmatic approach applying methodologies and toolkits across a range of European case studies (six core case studies and five followers) that reflect a cross-section of the challenges posed by CC adaptation and mitigation. The knowledge generated by DISTENDER will be offered by a Decision Support System (DSS) which will include guidelines, manuals, easy-to-use tools and experiences from the application of the cases studies.

SUITS takes a sociotechnical approach to capacity building in Local Authorities and transport stakeholder organisations with special emphasis on the transfer of learning to smaller sized cities, making them more effective and resilient to change in the judicious implementation of sustainable transport measures. Key outputs will be a validated capacity building program for transport departments, and resource light learning assets (modules, e-learning material, webinars and workshops), decision support tools to assist in procurement, innovative financing, engagement of new business partners and handling of open, real time and legacy data. SUITS argues that without capacity building and the transformation of transport departments into learning organisations, training materials will not provide the step change needed to provide innovative transport measures. Working with nine cities to model gaps in their understanding, motivation, communication and work practices, will provide each city with a map of its own strengths and weaknesses with respect to sustainable transport planning. From this, strategies to enhance capacity, based on each authority’s needs will be developed and organisations provided with the necessary techniques to increase their own capacity, mentored directly by research partners. Local champions will be trained to continue capacity building after the project. Using the CIVITAS framework for impact evaluation, the effectiveness and impact of SUITS in enabling reductions in transport problems such as congestion and pollution while improving cities capacity to grow as well as the quality of life for urban dwellers and commuters through the development of inclusive, integrated transport measures will be measured in the cities and at individual, organisational and institutional levels. All project outcomes will be disseminated in a stakeholder engagement program at local, national and EU wide levels, thereby increasing the likelihood of successful transport measures.

CO-SECUR aims to build knowledge and a suite of tools, including a Societal Development Plan (SDP) to foster and accelerate the adoption of social innovations and responsible innovation principles that contribute to successful, more effective, and co-produced security solutions for public spaces (with special focus on massive events and crowded places), generating trust, acceptance, increasing security, security perception, and security behavior. For that, CO-SECUR will follow a methodology of 4 phases: 1) Literature review of evidence in security and security perception; 2) Security practices mapping and selection; 3) Descriptive analysis of 72-180 case studies from 9 European countries and critical synthesis of results; and 4) Co-writing and validation of the SDP and tools involving the Quintuple helix + media through participative activities (i.e. hybrid seminars, national working groups, national workshops, public consultation at EU level). As a result, the SDP will contain a depth description of Social Innovation on Security in Europe, a compendium of good practices, and a roadmap of actions. The suite of tools will provide additional supportive material in terms of best practices on fostering smart local communities; policy recommendations on how to orientate security solutions towards RRI and social innovation involving the Quintuple helix + media; benchmarking for industry; and a summary of the innovative, transferable, and scalable Security Technologies. Partners will continue to disseminate and communicate the project progress and outcomes and organize a final Security Perception Conference. At the Conference, a Memorandum of Understanding will be launched and opened to be signed by any city/region willing to promote social innovation and RRI in the security solutions implemented in public spaces.