JPI Urban Europe project. April 2022 – March 2025.
Open Urban Sustainability Hubs is an international and transdisciplinary research project that analyzes the role of local knowledge infrastructures for sustainable urban development. It aims at finding measures to strengthen these infrastructures over a period of three years.
The OPUSH project consortium aims to improve urban sustainability through citizen science working in interdisciplinary teams and using co-creation processes. University libraries stand out as hubs of cutting-edge research. But for most citizens, their city library is a place that is more accessible. In the OPUSH project, the university partners team up with local libraries to create new networks in transdisciplinary contexts of sustainable development and sustainability transformation. Based on the diversity of the large number of students involved and the integration of disadvantaged population groups, OPUSH pursues an explicitly socially integrative community building approach.
In four cities and metropolitan regions, cooperation between universities, libraries, museums, city administration, and civil society are established, and approaches of citizen social science (CSS) are tested in these local networks.
All key activities are focused on the study, development, and implementation of inclusive knowledge ecosystems, addressing the gap between sustainability theory and sustainability transformation in practice (in particular the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), The New Urban Agenda and the World Climate Goals COP15). The project pursues a multi-layered approach to applied research and capacity building. By focusing on libraries (and potentially also on museums, archives, and galleries as cultural institutions with their specific research interests) as knowledge infrastructures and integrating local capacity building networks, capacities are developed on an institutional level to open the collaborative generation of knowledge in society. Citizen science (CS) experimentation in all involved cities guarantees capacity building and training by means of hands-on activities, where digital and non-digital tools and learning/training material are implemented as well as lessons learned for long-term development of open knowledge hubs.
OpenSystems is one of the partners of OPUSH and has an active role in several key activities such as the conceptual work on the intersection between citizen science and urban development and the building of the project’s evaluation framework.
OpenSystems has ideated and implemented in Barcelona the OPUSH pilot “Heat Chronicles”, also in collaboration with Vienna Technical University, which implemented another pilot addressing urban extreme heat.
Credits
The OPUSH project is financed by the ERA-NET Urban Transformation Capacities (ENUTC) programme with contract Nº 101003758 and by PCI2022-132996 project, financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 by the European Union “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR.
Partners
OPUSH consortium is composed of partners from 4 European Cities having complementary expertise in Citizen Science, Urban Planning and e-learning:
VIENNA (AUSTRIA)
future.lab Research Center (TU Wien Faculty of Architecture and Planning)
Research Library (TU Wien)
Wunderbyte (SME, experts for e-learning)
BARCELONA (SPAIN)
OpenSystems (Universitat de Barcelona)
Research and Learning Resources Center (CRAI) (Universitat de Barcelona)
TALLINN, ESTONIA
Academy of Architecture and Urban Studies (TalTech)
DELFT, THE NETHERLANDS
Research Library (TU Delft)
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (TU Delft)
Science Center (TU Delft)
