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.

What and how can we learn from animals about recovering from disasters? How can we hear them in their own terms, translate their stories, and include their perspectives, in human knowledge about disasters? This project explores the resilience of multispecies communities, and their capacities for healing and bouncing back from disasters, through the point of view of nonhuman animals. It departs from the current context of acute climate crisis, which sets the stage for Dantesque scenarios of impending climate-driven disasters such as wildfires, floods, tornados and hurricanes, with related extensive loss of both human and nonhuman lives, liveable dwellings and species extinction. Focusing on wildfires as disasters that challenge previous expert knowledge due to climate change and human exploitation of natural resources, we propose to compare three countries where wildfires have taken on increasingly critical proportions every year: Brazil, Australia and Portugal. We address a species gap in our knowledge of disasters, and wildfires in particular, by exploring the possibilities of learning with animals how to live and cope with extreme change and uncertainty in wildfire-prone areas. Drawing on contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, ethologists, biologists and geographers, ABIDE aims at attuning to, translating and including the voices, stories and experiences of animals into our knowledge of how multispecies communities can better recover from the traumatic experience of wildfires. In the end, we seek to build the foundations for a new interdisciplinary framework for addressing humans' and animals' ability to build and abide in multispecies communities that are more resilient to wildfires and other disasters. In so doing, we aspire to identify the landmarks of a post-species episteme, and thus push forward the frontiers of knowledge of human-animal relations, as well as contribute to a more-than-human governance of disasters.

Europe’s urban areas face significant challenges to ensure the availability and consumption of healthy, affordable, safe and sustainably produced food. Such challenges converge within local food environments, but are often neglected by public planners. Promising initiatives taken by municipalities to change the architecture of food choice often fail to become embedded in the wider policy context and to reach deprived and vulnerable groups. Key factors responsible for this are: (1) siloed ways of working and (2) fragmentation of knowledge on facilitators and barriers related to food system transformation. These factors hinder the development and implementation of integrated urban food policies. FOODCLIC will create strong science-policy-practice interfaces across eight European city-regions (45 towns and cities). The backbone of such interfaces will be provided by Food Policy Networks, which will manage real-world experimental Living Labs to build a policy-relevant evidence-base through learning-in-action. Activities will be informed by an innovative conceptual framework (the CLIC), which emphasizes four desired outcomes of food system integration (sustainability co-benefits, spatial linkages, social inclusion and sectoral connectivities). Capacity-building and direct support for intensive multi-stakeholder engagement (including deprived and vulnerable groups) will enable policy actors and urban planners across partner city-regions to develop continuously evolving integrated urban food policies and render planning frameworks food-sensitive. Results will be communicated and disseminated amongst others by extending the novel policy practices to another eight city-regions in Europe and Africa, an online Knowledge-Hub, a high-level Think Tank and partners’ networks. In these ways, FOODCLIC aims to contribute to urban food environments that make healthy and sustainable food available, affordable and attractive to all citizens (including deprived and vulnerable groups).

NATURESCAPES addresses the pressing challenge of realising the transformative potential of nature-based solutions (NBS) for climate change, biodiversity loss and social justice. Despite progress in the field, our knowledge of the synergies and trade-offs from implementing NBS at scale across diverse and interconnected landscapes is limited. At the same time, there remain challenges in designing the governance arrangements, finance and forms of citizen engagement are needed while the value NBS for diverse social actors is increasingly contested - especially where they seem to bring benefits to some and new forms of inequity and exclusion to others. Advancing the transformative potential of NBS requires that we address these underlying challenges together – ensuring they are both effective and just. NATURESCAPES will advance our understanding of how NBS across interconnected urban, rural and coastal landscapes generate benefits for diverse communities, particularly in areas of socio-economic disadvantage, inequity and risk. We will analyse the synergies/trade-offs emerging for climate, biodiversity and communities in 30 ‘naturescapes’ across Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and the USA, including 12 in-depth case-studies focusing on the dynamics of implementation, creating new insights and tools. In 7 of these cases we will co-design interventions with local collaborators that test transformative theories and practices of change and identify how these can be replicated. Led by Utrecht University, the NATURESCAPES consortium brings together expertise across the sciences, social sciences and humanities from five European Universities, The Nature Conservancy, WWF and Grupo Laera (a leading consultancy in NBS and ecosystem services in LAC), and an international collaboratory of stakeholders. Together, we will adopt a transdisciplinary approach to take forward the realisation of NBS that are transformative for climate change, biodiversity and communities.

Most fruit and vegetables required and enjoyed by European and North American societies would not be possible without the planting, harvesting and transporting performed by migrant labourers. Yet, the contribution of migrants to crucial food systems is generally hidden in the experience of buying and consuming food. In this project, I take asparagus from Germany, oranges from Spain and strawberries from California as the vantage points from which to see connections between migrants and societies as well as the ways in which those connections become invisibilized. I focus on embodied experiences in food circuits in order to understand the labour of producing and transporting food and the process of consuming and incorporating food into oneself. Tracing asparagus, oranges and strawberries through their circulation, I investigate the embodied experiences of migrant farm labourers – who are treated simultaneously as essential, disposable and sometimes prohibited; supply chain workers – who are made up increasingly of migrants and work under tight delivery time constraints; and consumers – who eat with diverse intentions of survival, enjoyment, identity and ethics. I propose a new way of seeing social and embodied connections between migrants and societies – through the beauty, brutality and necessity of food. With FOODCIRCUITS, I will provide novel contributions on three primary fronts: (i) developing a theory of connections between migrants and societies – including on embodied levels – by following fruit and vegetables as they circulate from the hands that pick them, through the arms that deliver them to the mouths that eat them; (ii) re-conceptualizing the ways in which indirect connections between different categories of people are invisibilized through the infrastructures and processes of producing, transporting and consuming food; (iii) expanding collaborative methods and ethics in field research across steep social and power hierarchies.