ROCK aims to develop an innovative, collaborative and circular systemic approach for regeneration and adaptive reuse of historic city centres. Implementing a repertoire of successful heritage-led regeneration initiatives, it will test the replicability of the spatial approach and of successful models addressing the specific needs of historic city centres. ROCK will transfer the Role Models blueprint to the Replicators, adopting a cross-disciplinary mentoring process and defining common protocols and implementation guidelines. ROCK will deliver new ways to access and experience Cultural Heritage [CH] ensuring environmental sound solutions, city branding, bottom-up participation via living labs, while increasing liveability and safety in the involved areas. ICT sensors and tools will support the concrete application of the ROCK principles and the interoperable platform will enable new ways to collect and exchange data to facilitate networking and synergies. The added value is the combination of sustainable models, integrated management plans and associated funding mechanisms based on successful financial schemes and promoting the creation of industry-driven stakeholders’ ecosystems. A monitoring tool is set up from the beginning, running during two additional years after the project lifetime. Main expected impacts deal with the achievement of effective and shared policies able to: accelerate heritage led regeneration, improve accessibility and social cohesion, increase awareness and participation in local decision making process and wider civic engagement, foster businesses and new employment opportunities. Involving 10 cities, 7 Universities, 3 networks of enterprises, 2 networks of cities and several companies and development agencies, a foundation and a charity, ROCK is able to catalyse challenges and innovative pathways across EU and beyond, addressing CH as a production and competitiveness factor and a driver for sustainable growth.

URBREATH vision is to develop, implement, demonstrate, validate and replicate a comprehensive, community participation and NBS-driven urban revitalisation, resilience and climate neutrality paradigm that will ultimately radically enhance the social interactions, inclusion, equitability and liveability in cities. Specifically, the aim of the URBREATH project is to implement hybrid/Natural Base Solutions putting at the heart of the decision-making process the communities within a city. Advanced techniques, particularly Local Digital Twins and AI, and social innovation will facilitate the achievement of its vision. The project will have four phases: 1. Inception, 2. Development, 3. Piloting, 4. Transition. The preliminary results of a single Phase are evaluated within the following Phase so to allow for feedback before releasing the final version. The Inception phase will define the methodology to be followed for the project development and will deliver the project functional and technical requirements. The second phase will release the URBREATH technical framework, consisting of tools to manage the whole data value chain and to support end-users to collaborate on the design and creation of NBS to be used in the city/district. It will be used to monitor and take decisions on the NBS to be implemented/deployed in the Piloting phase (evidence-based decision making), that involves 4 Front Runner Cities in 4 different climatic zones: Cluj-Napoca (RO - Continental), Leuven (BE – Atlantic), Madrid (ES – Mediterranean), and Tallin (EE – Boreal). During the Transition phase, all the information, results and lessons learnt from the previous steps will be collected and analysed to provide recommendations and foster replication activities and the uptake of project outputs at the end of its lifespan. To this aim, 5 Follower Cities are involved: Aarhus (DK), Athens (EL), Kajaani (FI), Parma (IT), Pilsen (CZ), linked to the Front Runners for climatic zone and/or dimension.

ClimaGen will demonstrate how Climate-resilient regeneration and renaturing for, by and with vulnerable neighbourhoods, can help cities and regions in their transitions towards net-zero. 5 Demonstration cities (Belgrade, Gdańsk, Tartu, Torino, and Trondheim), will implement 25% increased share of newly created and/or restored public green spaces in each city. 4 Replication Cities (Cluj-Napoca, Eindhoven, Gernika and Thessaloniki) will experiment with shorter-term co-creative measures with the same objectives and methods to plan for future implementation of the measures. All 9 cities will run their own Work Packages in ClimaGen, supported by 5 cross-cutting concepts and 4 transversal WPs: ClimaGreens will nurture integrated renaturing measures that create resilience at several scales, and avoid maladaptation in the journey to climate-neutrality. ClimaLabs will provide local and regional collaborative governance, with arts, culture and youth, entrepreneurship and financing, and organisational resilience in long-term planning strategies. ClimaImpact will generate evidence-based decision support and valuation of co-benefits, in easy-to-understand and, where possible, visualised formats. ClimaValue will offer outreach, capacity building and policy guidance, with strategic advocacy together with sister projects and close collaboration with Missions/NEB communities, while an evidence-based ClimaGen Guidance Package will disseminate results and knowledge to cities. City Dialogues and cross-cutting Sense-Making Sessions will support local implementation and common learning. Together these define impact pathways to knowledge sharing, scaling and replication. The ClimaGen Games will tie these activities together with a portfolio of participatory, gamified, citizen-science-based methods to engage all partners and stakeholders in an inclusive manner, and to use their diversity as a strength.

Our world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges. Keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5°C implies a mandatory drop in CO2 emissions. Against this backdrop, the EC has issued the European Green Deal: an ambitious plan towards a fully sustainable economy, including aviation. With one million species endangered, biodiversity restoration is another key issue. Once aviation has recovered from the COVID pandemic effects, global air traffic as a major enabler of connectivity and economic growth will resume and keep increasing. This emphasizes the challenge of reducing the environmental impact of the air transportation sector as a whole. OLGA partners (airports, airline, handler, industry, research, SMEs) unite a wealth of expertise to contribute to solving this complex challenge: efficient and carbon neutral airport and airline operations, sustainable logistics, smart energy & mobility, intermodality for passengers and freight, emission/air quality assessments, green construction and circular end-of-life solutions. Sustainable Aviation Fuels supply chains will be integrated in conventional jet fuel infrastructure. Complementary types of low-emission mobilities, electric ground support equipment, hydrogen infrastructure and reduced carbon airside operations will be demonstrated. OLGA will achieve significant quantified advances already within the first three years, ready for exploitation by partners. This will lead to proven CO2 reduction, air quality improvement and biodiversity preservation with involvement of the entire sector's value chain. Sustainable impacts will be realised on societal, environmental and economic levels at local, national and EU scale. OLGA will have a duration of 60 months, requesting a 25 MEuros grant. OLGA's airports are uniquely positioned to showcase the environmental innovations, while the airports of Zagreb and Cluj will prove scalability and EU-wide applicability.

The vision of REFLOW is to develop circular and regenerative cities through the re-localisation of production and the re-configuration of material flows at different scales. More specifically, it will use Fab Labs and makerspaces as catalysers of a systemic change in urban and peri-urban environments, which enable, visualize and regulate “four freedoms”: free movement of materials, people, (technological) knowledge and commons, in order to reduce materials consumption, maximize multifunctional use of (public) spaces and envisage regenerative practices. Concretely, REFLOW aims at providing realistic best practices aligning market and government needs in order to create favourable conditions for the public and private sector to adopt circular principles. In order to provide critical examples of ways in which cities can adopt a CE model and reach the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, REFLOW will create new CE business models (Distributed Design Market model, On-Demand System, Corporate Hacking and Corporate Pyramid) within 6 pilot cities (Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan, Paris, Vejle and Cluj-Napoca) and assess their social, environmental and economic impact. The project will make use of blockchain technologies in order to incentivise the circular practices in local ecosystems and data visualisation tools to enable continuous monitoring and optimisation of “urban metabolic” processes and rapid interventions management. Networks of sensors, urban computing and geo-localisation will capture data ensuring accuracy, integrity and interoperability of relevant data infrastructures, while data visualisation and standard templates will be available for effective communication, public consultation, and exchange of experiences.