A major, albeit underestimated, by-product of urbanization is the exponential increase of human exposure to artificial light. Outdoor illumination, artificial sky glow, domestic lighting, light-emitting screens, etc. entrain circadian clock. Despite scientific evidence on the pathogenic role of circadian rhythms disruption in predisposing to NCDs, affecting sleep, metabolism, immune function and many aspects of behavior and mood, EU cities are mostly focusing on improving lighting services’ efficiency, reducing costs and emissions, but failing to consider lighting impacts on health and wellbeing. Through an open-online Urban Lighting and Health Atlas, ENLIGHTENme will collect and systematize existing data and good practices on urban lighting and will perform an accurate study on the correlations among health, wellbeing, lighting and socio-economic factors in 3 pilot cities -Amsterdam, Bologna and Tartu, where a target district will be selected due to its exposure to artificial light and to reflect social inequalities. Through the establishment of Lighting Urban Labs within the district, citizens and stakeholders will co-create innovative Lighting Urban Plans measures and define the implementation of a smart outdoor lighting system and indoor lighting changes in a pilot area within the district. There, a population-based study on elderly – addressed as a vulnerable group particularly prone to suffer circadian misalignment – will allow to assess lighting-dependent risks on mental and health conditions and surveys involving the overall district population and users will allow assess the impacts of urban lighting on quality of life and wellbeing. The results will allow to develop a dedicated Decision Support System and guidelines and recommendation on the impact of lighting on health and wellbeing, proposing innovative lighting policies, measures, technologies and interventions aiming at improving citizens’ health and wellbeing in cities. ENLIGHTENme is a part of the European Cluster on Urban Health.

A new tendency is on the rise in EU urban policy-making: adopting Co-production Arrangements inspired by the paradigm of the Commons (CAC). Some pioneering cases stand out, such as the Urban Commons Regulation in Bologna (2014), the Commons Transition Plan in Ghent (2017) and the Citizen Assets Programme in Barcelona (2017). These cities have been joined by others that either have adopted similar arrangements or are currently considering adopting them. By and large, these arrangements aim to redistribute decision-making power to citizens over services and resources that are considered as essential for urban collective wellbeing (e.g. public buildings and spaces, energy and water utilities) by fostering community self-management. Preliminary and applied research on these arrangements has been carried out, mostly based on single case study analyses. However, scientific, in-depth and comparative knowledge on CAC is still scarce. By adopting an urban epistemology to the traditional state-centred political science field, COMMONCITY will produce key, useful and timely knowledge on CAC. It will comparatively analyse the i) policy models, ii) political, social and administrative challenges, iii) impact on urban democracy of recently adopted CAC in the three EU pioneering cities: Barcelona, Bologna and Ghent. By adopting a co-production-oriented approach to data collection and analysis that will foster citizen science, it will provide unique empirical data on the varieties, effective functioning and democratising effect of these arrangements. The results of COMMONCITY will contribute to the scientific debate in the broad urban study field and, specifically, in urban democracy, urban governance, urban policy-making and urban participation. It will also provide policy recommendations to various levels of government, in order to foster the adoption of CAC and improve the functioning and democratic impact of existing and under-adoption ones.

Drastic decrease in transport emissions of 55% by 2030 and 90% by 2050 is required for European cities to reach climate neutrality. This is hindered by inconvenient mobility infrastructure, inadequate services and insufficient governance for short-distance travel, negatively impacting active modes’ safety and security. REALLOCATE’s main objective is to pave the way towards climate-neutral, safe, inclusive and smart European cities through integrated and innovative sustainable urban mobility solutions that will address the needs of diverse groups and communities, while rebalancing street space allocation. The project will empower 10 twinned Mission Cities (Gothenburg-Tampere, Heidelberg-Utrecht, Lyon-Warsaw, Budapest-Zagreb, Barcelona-Bologna) by providing horizontal thematic expertise, supporting them to build a local innovation ecosystem to develop and deploy zero-emission, shared, inclusive, active and human-centred mobility interventions. Pilots in 15 urban and peri-urban unsafe areas will demonstrate innovative urban space management and reallocation strategies for sustainable modes (with a specific focus on active modes), having in mind safety, inclusivity, affordability and a just transition to climate neutrality overall. Solutions include innovative urban design, behavioural nudging, smart technological and data-driven solutions to reduce actual and perceived road safety risks, all contributing to achieving climate neutrality by 2030. The pilots will be the learning and testing environments for integrated approaches to foster knowledge transfer and collaborative learning to staff in cities through mentoring and capacity building, knowledge exchange, twinning and work shadowing. The project’s impact will be exponentially increased by engaging 10 Cascade Cities in capacity building activities, and providing them with replication packages and guidelines resulting in implementation plans for replicating at least one of the innovative solutions piloted.

INCA project investigates the impact that so-called digital platforms have on European democracies and institutions. Indeed, while promoting economic growth and labour transformations, these platforms pose challenges to policymakers and citizens in relation to people’ participation in decision-making processes, wealth inequalities and erosion of trust into public institutions. In particular, so-called GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) are becoming more and more infrastructures for opinion-making, labour organization and political debate. Their increasing power in shaping and influencing such issues through lobbying, industrial relations and cultural impact opened up a wide debate on the way to deal with these transformations. While European societies grew up based on liberal democracies and institutions with their capacity to sustain a coordinated market economy, today their role seems to be reduced because of the difficulties to regulate platforms’ corporate power that spread through politics, economy and culture. INCA aims to • define forms to sustain trust in institutions and new models of governance capable to combine the growth of platforms with social inclusion and citizens participation in decision making processes; • stimulate alternative business models and industrial relations so to make GAFAM and platforms accountable to social fairness while preserving their innovation; • to clarify the way GAFAM influence European citizens opinion conditioning democratic processes. Exploring the socio-historical roots behind platforms growth and the erosion of a coordinated market economy, collecting solid data on GAFAM lobbying, industrial relations and opinion-making, and producing participatory actions for the empowerment of democratic processes and citizens’ engagement, INCA contributes to instil greater democratic accountability and inclusion in economic processes prompted by digital transformations.

Big-data management through high-performance computing is nowadays considered as the richness of the new knowledge economy, providing unprecedented opportunities in several R&I and applicative domains, from climate change to health, from mobility to cultural heritage, from digital change in production systems to new materials and financial analysis. In Italy, 70% of the national computing and storage capacity is set in the Emilia-Romagna Region, making it an authentic Data Valley. While supercomputing infrastructures are a pre-requisite for European competitiveness, data-driven R&I needs qualified experts in datascience and big-data application in relevant societal/industrial domains. In this context, the University of Bologna in partnership with the other 5 universities located in the region, with the support of the Regional Authority and involving the relevant stakeholders, is proposing FutureData4EU, to train the data-science experts of tomorrow through an interdisciplinary, international and cross-sectoral approach. FutureData4EU builds on existing PhD courses will offer a pioneering combination of training in research and transversal skills in the multi- and trans-disciplinary field of Big-Data, through the enabling technologies and the Thematic Areas representing the Horizon Europe Clusters (1. Health; 2. Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society; 3. Civil Security for Society; 4. Digital, Industry and Space; 5. Climate, Energy and Mobility; 6. Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment).