Smart Shrinkage Solutions - Fostering Resilient Cities in Inner Peripheries of Europe is a project that offers the best practice and most feasible solutions to the problem of urban shrinkage - a continuous population decline affecting more than 1,500 cities all over Europe. By learning from the experience of the cities that once were on the edge of an abyss but have bounced back to life, by sharing the key ingredients of their success across Europe and beyond, this project enables as many shrinking cities as possible to adapt, transform, and thrive in the face of continuously and often dramatically changing circumstances.

SUPPORTER advances inclusive gender+ equality within the ERA. It supports institutions to develop intersectional, innovative, inclusive and impactful gender equality plans (4I-GEPs), tailored to sports higher education institutions, and explicitly addressing gender-based violence including sexual harassment (GBV). Building on state-of the-art knowledge and the expertise of advanced gender+ equality institutions, SUPPORTER co-creates an innovative capacity-building and mutual learning programme, delivering support and mentoring towards the development of the 4I-GEPs. Guided by inclusive and innovative epistemologies and co-creative methodologies SUPPORTER acts: -horizontally, by fostering institutional capacity and culture based on the principles of Diversity & Inclusion within an intersectional framework, ultimately enhancing the sports institutions’ reputation, attractiveness, inclusiveness and research excellence; -vertically, by triggering a transformative, institutional inclusive and sustainable change to sports institutions to address inequality-driven challenges and advance gender+ equality, focusing on GBV, thus also enhancing the institutions’ efforts towards meeting their gender+ equality objectives in the ERA context. To achieve these objectives SUPPORTER adopts a twinning-inspired approach, methodologically based on 3 interlinked processes (analytical, reflective, implementation), combining 4I learning and mutual learning schemes with co-creation and dissemination activities, engaging a diverse range of stakeholders, and building on knowledge and expertise from previous projects and tools. The multiplier effect of SUPPORTER, starting from the eight partner institutions and gradually reaching the sports ecosystem, has the long-term potential to trigger gender+ institutional change in a variety of further institutions, reaching society more broadly and contributing to wide-range systemic societal changes in line with the Ljubljana Declaration objectives.

The project has 2 type of FELLOWSHIPS: For youth SCOs managers, decision makers and project managers open for most experienced youth workers from each partner and external SCOs. They pass transnational trainings for FELLOWSHIP promotion and management, and work for 12 months on promotion, management and implementation and evaluation with both key mentors of the project, stakeholders and the fellows themselves. In the process they improve project management, networking, training skills and intercultural capacity. They work on both local assignments and this transnational project as each fellow promoter communicates with at least 150 external SCOs, experts, stakeholders and policymakers. They design programs, evaluate fellows, support fellows projects, support project partners in organisation of fellows selection and the TEST events YOUTH academies for youth workers and for youth leaders. They volunteer and train in the VIRTUAL support centre or promote the project, support project partners for local promotion events. This fellowship thus accelerates youth SCO managers’ capacity to manage and promote youth projects and engages them in active interaction with most motivated youth leaders and workers during the project. Second type of fellowships /based on 12 joint programes/ aims at the brightest and most motivated youth workers and youth leaders – 200 at least from the 6 countries. It is highly competitive and has: 1 kick off, interim and on-line 6 month training module, followed by 6 month job shadowing from lead experts of all project partners. BOTH TYPES of fellowships are merit based, all fellows are challenged to promote their job and results, and only the most motivated and successful gain access to second training rounds. The YOUTHWORK ACADEMY events are in fact large scale, highly interactive forums for exchange of best practices for youth work among the most motivated youth workers from each country and also platform where each FELLOW has place to present projects, ideas and vision for the future of their youth projects. Each project second exchange /training course is for the best, on-line nominated fellows which stimulates them to use ICT and social media promotion skills so as not only to share the challenges met but also the local project designed, the impact of local youth. Our Fellows are thus motivated to show the best in their work, and inspire more young people to participate in local life, or youth workers to pursue the E+ opportunities for training, mobility and study abroad. BOTH FELLOWSHIPs train and involve Fellows in interactions and debates with experts from SCOs and public bodies from consortium, but also in interaction with local SCOs, stakeholders and policymakers from the 6 countries. In addition Partner search group and individual network sessions are provided by the VIRTUAL support tool. The project is co-manages, shared is responsibility not only among the partners but also among the key project and mentorship

HARMONIA will leverage existing tools, services and novel technologies to deliver an integrated resilience assessment platform working on top of GEOSS, seeing the current lack of a dedicated process of understanding and quantifying Climate Change (CC) effects on urban areas using Satellite and auxiliary data available on GEOSS, DIAS, urban TEP, GEP etc. platforms. HARMONIA will focus on a solution for climate applications supporting adaptation and mitigation measures of the Paris Agreement. HARMONIA will test modern Remote Sensing tools and 3D-4D monitoring, Machine Learning/Deep Learning techniques and develop a modular scalable data-driven multi-layer urban areas observation information knowledge base, using Satellite data time series, spatial information and auxiliary data, in-situ observing systems, which will integrate detailed information on local level of neighborhoods/building blocks. HARMONIA focuses on two pillars: a) Natural and manmade hazards intensified by CC: urban flooding, soil degradation and geo-hazards (landslides, earthquake, ground deformation) and b) Manmade hazards: heat islands, urban heat fluxes, Air Quality, Gas emissions. Sustainable reconstruction of urban areas and the health of humans and ecosystems, are top priorities. HARMONIA will take into account the local ecosystems of European urban areas, following an integrated and sustainable approach by incorporating the active communities’ participation initiative, which will involve the use of a social platform. Paying extra attention to Sustainable Urban Development, one of the Societal Benefit Areas posits that use of EO is a crucial tool towards resilient cities and the assessment of urban footprints, to promote equity, welfare and shared prosperity for all, feed new indicators for the monitoring of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals in an EU context.

The overall project objectives are to produce new knowledge in the area of codim k bifurcations for continuous and discrete (smooth and non-smooth) dynamical systems and provide training in this area of research to early stage researchers. More exactly, we plan firstly to study degenerate two-dimensional Bautin bifurcation for the case when the second Lyapunov coefficient equals zero. Secondly, we aim to study degenerate four-dimensional Hopf-Hopf bifurcations. The degeneracy arises in this case when one or more of the nine generic conditions needed in obtaining a normal form fail to be satisfied. The third and fourth objectives are to study other codim k bifurcations in smooth and non-smooth dynamical systems arising from other bifurcations which bear or not a known name in the literature. In particular, we will focus on discontinuous piecewise differential systems, respectively, continuous and discrete non-smooth dynamical systems resulting from modelling oscillators with impacts. A number of about 40 researchers (30 ERs and 10 ESRs) will contribute to achieving the project objectives by a networking approach based on about 225 months of secondments. Two types of secondments are planned, one for research and another for training. The training is of type training-through-research. During the research secondments, the project ERs will perform research for achieving the planned project tasks and will support ESRs on their training. The training secondments are dedicated to ESRs. Apart from the planned training, the ESRs will participate also to the project research. They will receive specific research tasks from their local managers to contribute to the project research objectives.