How the Centre Works

The UNIC Centre for City Futures consists of ten local centres that harvest understanding of specific needs of their regions and tailor activities to suit these needs. These local centres are closely interconnected to match-make city-engaged research and learning, contributing to both local and transnational urban challenges.

Together all ten centres constitute the UNIC Centre for City Futures and are united by a shared vision and mission for urban impact, improvement and European transformations. Within their respective contexts, they employ a centralized open discovery process for city impact making with co-creation and inclusion at the heart of all operations.

The Centre's Mission

At the heart of our mission is to understand complex societal phenomena in our ten UNIC cities and to envision attractive futures that overcome urban challenges. Guided by these future objectives, we strategize and build local and transnational partnerships able to contribute to societal improvement. Our living laboratory provides pathways and tools for impact-oriented research, education, and innovation.

By linking ten university-city contexts, we form a large-scale transnational living laboratory, where UNIC CityLabs provide unique access to innovative data sources and opportunities for challenge-based learning and City-Engaged Research. Operating in genuine real-world settings, our CityLabs bridge the gap between theory and practice. They bring people together from different backgrounds to identify needs and challenges, envision preferable futures, and to develop, test and refine solutions.

We are committed to bringing the needs of cities and communities into learning and research. In return, the cities and communities are enriched and improved by the contributions of our researchers, teachers, and students. These contributions and operations are consistently assessed to ensure meaningful societal impact.