The network for European research cooperation, Urban-net, consists of the EU member state organisations which finance and promote research on sustainable urban development. It is funded by the EU, and its aim is to support European research cooperation in different ways.
Sixteen organisations in twelve EU countries and Turkey are members of Urban-net. The UN organisation for housing issues, UN-Habitat, is also a member. The flux of people and resources which creates opportunitiees but also problems does not stop at the frontiers of Europe. The pilot call, which is described below, therefore attracted notifications of interest from e.g. Mongolia and Kenya. Israeli researchers participate, without funding, in one of the pre-research projects. In an adjacent article, Naison Mutitzwa-Mangisa, representative of UN-Habitat in Urban-net, describes the global dimension of the urban environmental problems and the need for Swedish participation.
Work in Urban-net has so far resulted in a searchable database for current and concluded research programmes. A framework for sustainable urban research has also been developed by an iterative process which, in Sweden, comprised seminars on important research problems, attended by researchers and practitioners, in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö and at Swedish Board of Housing, Building and Planning. Discussions are also in progress at present concerning other forms of cooperation for Urban-net, such as the exchange of postgraduate students, common inputs for the dissemination of research results and practical experiences, development of indicators and benchmarking, exchange of staff, etc. One important aim of Urban-net is to establish joint calls for research funding. It is the job of Formas to organise these. A pilot call has been made. It was open to applications for three months at the beginning of 2008, and the selected research projects have recently commenced. A new call is being planned at present.
Broad theme of the pilot call
The common theme of the pilot call was urban research with a broad perspective on sustainability. It concerned the relationship among sectors, rather than in-depth examination of each sector individually. Examples of what this might involve were set out in a thematic framework developed within Urban-net. Resilient City was a theme that applied to projects in which Dutch researchers were engaged.
The call related to two types of projects,
- Research projects of up to two years' duration
- Shorter pre-research activities, such as preparing a research application for the next Urban-net call (end of October 2009) or the 7th Framework Programme, arranging a conference or workshop, or drawing up a state of the art report in a certain area.
The projects must involve researchers from at least three countries. Since the researchers are funded by an organisation in the country where they work, they must abide by the rules which the organisation has regarding finance.
Many Swedish researchers
After a formal and scientific scrutiny, eleven research projects were selected for joint funding. The projects comprise 42 research teams – totalling more than 90 researchers – in 12 countries. They are funded by the organisations in the countries where the researchers are active, i.e. Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Sweden and Turkey. Swedish researchers are involved in most of the funded projects, both because Sweden has contributed quite a lot of money, and because the research projects are of high quality.
A common feature of all the projects are studies in which countries and regions are compared, and all have a more or less transdisciplinary approach. Several projects take the predicted climate changes as their starting point. Three of these have Swedish coordinators. A fourth Swedish-coordinated project deals with ecosystem services. (See the articles in this issue). In other respects the projects are very similar in their character and content. They deal with issues ranging from politics, economics and planning to the warming of cities.
The next chance in October
A new call for fund applications will be advertised in the end of October. It is based on experiences from the pilot call and is funded up to the end of 2012. The first important decision concerns the themes of the call. Climate issues and what can be done about these will probably be one of the themes.
Some funding agencies have their own programmes to conform to and allocate the bulk of their funds to more precisely defined tasks, while others such as Formas allocate most of their funds to open calls where the researchers themselves formulate the problems, or at least to calls where funds are applied for in open competition.
The selected projects will be able to start before the summer of 2010 and will run for a maximum of three years until the summer of 2013. By then the Urban-net project will have finished, and it is hoped that the transnational calls will have been integrated into the work of Formas.
Author
:
Kristina Björnberg
senior Research Officer at Formas
E-mail:
kristina.bjornberg@formas.se
Ulla Westerberg
senior Research Officer at Formas, responsible for urban research and Urban-net
E-mail:
ulla.westerberg@formas.se