TURAS (Transitioning towards Urban Resilience and Sustainability)

Institute’s role: Project partner

Background: TURAS aims to create practical solutions to help European cities become more resilient to the challenges of climate change, natural resource shortages and unsustainable urban growth. 

Challenge: Over half of the global population live in urban areas and this is predicted to rise. Cities represent the major consumer of resources, are vulnerable to gradual environmental change, and contain many socio-economically disadvantaged communities. The key challenge is to identify ways to make urban living more sustainable, while addressing the diverse and complex needs of a city and its population.

Activity: Over the five year duration of the project, partners are focusing on developing and testing new strategies and tools to help cities become more sustainable and resilient.

The Institute focused on demonstration activity in Poplar, East London. Building on the relationships developed as part of the Total Community Retrofit project, the Institute worked with Poplar HARCA to help them get more productive uses from derelict and underused assets (such as buildings, garages and small patches of land). These assets have the potential to spur on entrepreneurial ideas and activity that in turn generate wider economic, social and environmental community benefits.

The Institute also worked with the University of East London to design a programme of Green Infrastructure projects alongside a major road in Poplar. The ambition was to transform a noisy and polluted arterial road, with large, largely-unused concrete paths, into an asset that mitigated the pollution and encouraged more people to walk down and across this major road.

TURAS activity will finish in 2016-2017, however, the Institute's involvement has come to an end beginning 2016. 

Institute partners: Led by University College Dublin, the Institute joins 27 project partners comprising researchers, local authorities, and businesses, from ten different European countries including Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.

Funders: Part-funded by the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

Further information: For more information on TURAS, click here.