How can researchers successfully engage with citizens to improve their scientific outputs? To find out, we talked to ERC grantee, Anna Davies of Trinity College Dublin, the winner of the first ERC Public Engagement Award in the online and social media category. Her project set out to map urban food-sharing practices and discovered early on that they would need the help of citizen scientists.
What were the main goals of your SHARECITY project?
SHARECITY was seeking to understand contemporary food sharing and particularly sharing beyond familial settings, so beyond the family. We were particularly interested in its impact on society, the economy and the environment.
Growing cities face a number of problems relating to climatic conditions and congestion. The EU-funded urbisphere initiative will adopt a radically new approach in addressing this issue. It will forecast and project urban futures and climates using a dynamic framework that incorporates weather, air quality, differential exposure and vulnerability of people from neighbourhoods to cities. The project will develop and link urban-surface models as well as human exposure and vulnerability models to better forecast exposure, emissions and intervention potential in cities. The system will use a real-time 4D smart urban observation system to provide targeted data using novel ground and remote-sensing technology. The urbisphere project will show scientists a new way to conceptualise, characterise and forecast climate and urban planning for cities.
Objective
urbisphere will change how the scientific community conceptualises, characterizes and forecasts cities in the climate system and in urban planning, by developing a radically new approach to integrate multiple dimensions of urban change, their interaction and feedbacks. It aims to forecast and project urban futures and climates in a dynamic framework considering weather, air quality, differential exposure and vulnerability of people at neighbourhood to city scale. It will provide new insights into existing and emerging risks, based on a synergistic effort across disciplines which currently work mostly in parallel. Urban-Surface Models (USM) and Human Exposure and Vulnerability models (HEV) will be developed and coupled to improve the forecasting of exposure, emissions, and intervention potentials in cities. This will transform emergency/risk management, atmospheric forecasting and long-term urban development/adaptation strategies in the urban sphere.
The system will use a real-time 4D Smart Urban Observation System (SmUrObS) to provide targeted urban form/function/emissions/exposure data using novel ground and remote sensing technology. The USM-HEV-SmUrObS system will equip us with: 1) a deep understanding of socio-economic dynamics and human behaviour and responses to weather and climate, economic (and other) drivers that transform cities’ exposure and vulnerability to climate change-related hazards (like heat); 2) a consistent method that can be scaled from detailed high-resolution modelling of intra-neighbourhood scale characteristics, to climate and socio-economic modelling and assessment at city, regional and global scales; 3) an approach that can inform global climate and global vulnerability and risk modelling; will allow consistent downscaling to the city for decision making for local urban risk and resilience management; and provide information on the dynamic nexus of exposure and vulnerability of people in cities.
How can the city be understood differently through engaging with sound? To answer this question, the EU-funded SONCITIES project gathers sound theorists and artists, urban sociologists, architects and designers to develop a new framework of sonic urbanism that can address the neglect of sound in architecture and urban design. The first step will be to conduct ethnographic research with urban residents and communities to learn how people experience and shape urban soundscapes. The next step is to form a mobile urban sound laboratory that will travel to different cities to collaborate with local architects and designers in generating new sonic modes of urban analysis. Finally, the project will develop new sonic modes of urban design in the context of design weeks, public exhibits and creative interventions in cities.
Objective
Architecture and urban design, disciplines heavily rooted in visual epistemologies, have long neglected sound, or else treated it in very limited ways: as a physical quantity that can be modelled and controlled; or else as noise, something to be reduced or eliminated. The neglect of sound on the part of the built environment professions has been damaging for cities, which suffer from poor acoustic design. As cities come under increasing scrutiny in a rapidly urbanising world, it is time to turn attention to one of the most pervasive—yet most neglected—aspects of urban life: how cities sound; how the experience of urban soundscapes is differentiated along social and cultural lines; and how to harness the creative potential of sound to build healthier, more inclusive, more sustainable cities. SONCITIES will bring together sound theorists, urban sociologists, architects, urban designers and sound artists to develop the conceptual framework of sonic urbanism: a new acoustic paradigm for cities.
First, we will conduct unprecedented ethnographic research with urban residents and communities, aiming to discover how people experience and shape urban soundscapes in their everyday lives. On this basis we will form a mobile urban sound laboratory to generate new sonic modes of urban analysis in dialogue with built environment practitioners internationally. Finally, we will develop new sonic modes of urban design in the context of Design Weeks, public exhibitions, and creative sonic interventions in cities: projects that will serve as prototypes for sonic urbanism. SONCITIES is led by a sound theorist and sound art practitioner at Oxford University with a proven record of collaboration with architects and urbanists. Through SONCITIES, sound will be placed at the forefront of creative practice in architecture and urban design, and sonic urbanism will emerge as an innovative theoretical paradigm that fundamentally transforms how cities are understood, designed and experienced.
The ERC's mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, on the basis of scientific excellence.
The ERC complements other funding activities in Europe such as those of the national research funding agencies, and is a flagship component of Horizon Europe, the European Union's Research Framework Programme for 2021 to 2027.
Being 'investigator-driven', or 'bottom-up', in nature, the ERC approach allows researchers to identify new opportunities and directions in any field of research, rather than being led by priorities set by politicians. This ensures that funds are channelled into new and promising areas of research with a greater degree of flexibility.
ERC grants are awarded through open competition to projects headed by starting and established researchers, irrespective of their origins, who are working or moving to work in Europe. The sole criterion for selection is scientific excellence. The aim here is to recognise the best ideas, and confer status and visibility on the best brains in Europe, while also attracting talent from abroad.
However, the ERC aims to do more than simply fund research. In the long term, it looks to substantially strengthen and shape the European research system. This is done through high quality peer review, the establishment of international benchmarks of success, and the provision of up-to-date information on who is succeeding and why.
The hope is that these processes will help universities and other research institutions gauge their performance and encourage them to develop better strategies to establish themselves as more effective global players.
By challenging Europe's brightest minds, the ERC expects that its grants will help to bring about new and unpredictable scientific and technological discoveries - the kind that can form the basis of new industries, markets, and broader social innovations of the future.
Ultimately, the ERC aims to make the European research base more prepared to respond to the needs of a knowledge-based society and provide Europe with the capabilities in frontier research necessary to meet global challenges.
ERC in a nutshell
The ERC aims to:
Support the best of the best in Europe across all fields of science, scholarship and engineering
Promote wholly investigator-driven, or 'bottom-up' frontier research
Encourage the work of the established and next generation of independent top research leaders in Europe
Reward innovative proposals by placing emphasis on the quality of the idea rather than the research area
Raise the status and visibility of European frontier research and the very best researchers of today and tomorrow
What is 'frontier research' and what are its benefits?
Today the distinction between 'basic' and 'applied' research has become blurred, due to the fact that emerging areas of science and technology often cover substantial elements of both. As a result, the term 'frontier research' was coined for ERC activities since they will be directed towards fundamental advances at and beyond the 'frontier' of knowledge.
The ERC aims to bring about a wide range of benefits in the following ways:
By creating open and direct competition for funding between the very best researchers in Europe, the ERC will enhance aspirations and achievements. It will enable the best ideas and talents to be recognised from a larger pool than exists at national level.
The ERC's competitive funding will be able to channel funds into the most promising new fields, with a degree of agility not always possible in national funding schemes.
The ERC aims to stimulate research organisations to invest more in the support of promising new talents - the next generation of research leaders in Europe.
On the economic side, the ERC will help nurture science-based industry and create a greater impetus for the establishment of research-based spin-offs.
From a societal perspective, the ERC could provide a mechanism for investing rapidly in research targeted at new and emerging issues confronting society.
Cities are getting bigger and smarter. Can we still live in them? ERC researchers are on a quest to make our digitized mega-cities more livable.
It was a warning of troubles ahead. In 2008, a 14-year-old Polish schoolboy hacked into the tram system in Łodz, Poland. For a lark, he reprogrammed a TV remote control to take command of the city’s track points. He proved to be a lousy driver: four trams derailed, more than a dozen people were injured. And yet, there he was playing with the city’s transit system like it was a model train set.
Since then, other urban hackings have made headlines around the world – highlighting how vulnerable our computerised infrastructure really is. Cities are getting bigger and bigger: by 2050, 82 per cent of Europe’s projected population of 581 million will be urban, according to the United Nations. And as cities grow, we keep adding technology: we’re sensing, filming, measuring, analysing, controlling our urban environments constantly. With everything connected to everything else, the city is a place not just of daily wonder but of possible crisis. Added to the routine problems of bad traffic, noise pollution, fouled air, lurking crime, the modern “smart” city starts to look pretty dumb – if not downright unliveable.
Can we fix that?
Can our best minds – in urban planning, civil engineering, computer technology, sociology and other fields – find solutions? “We just can’t afford to say no”, says Debra Laefer, associate professor in the School of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at University College Dublin. “We’re going to get two billion more people on the planet between now and 2050. And we know two-thirds of them are going to want to live in cities.”
Ludovic Leclercq, Research Director at The French Institute of Science and Technology in Transport, Planning and Networks agrees. “My idea is to provide tools for people to think of new ways of managing cities,” he says.
Leclerq and Laefer are among scores of scientishttps://www.sciencesquared.eu/wanted-human-cityts now applying their in-depth subject expertise to urban research projects funded by the European Research Council, one of Europe’s biggest frontier-research funders. Laefer has developed a new technique for aerial mapping of heritage buildings to help in avoiding damage when tunnelling below them for underground transport systems. Leclerq is laying the foundations for next-generation road traffic management systems that anticipate congestion, rather than reacting to it.
Other ERC-funded researchers are studying how nature builds ecosystems in a diminishing number of green spaces, new ways of modelling cities, and how, in addition to being a source of annoyance, traffic noise actually damages our health. This is blue-sky stuff; it won’t get the refuse collected in your neighbourhood tomorrow. But like all frontier research, it will eventually transform our lives – in this case, what it’s like to live in a big city.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions - Developing talents, advising research
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions are the European Union’s reference programme for doctoral education and postdoctoral training. They contribute to excellent research, boosting jobs, growth and investment by equipping researchers with new knowledge and skills. They foster research cooperation across borders, sectors and disciplines.
Objectives of the MSCA
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fund excellent research and innovation and equip researchers at all stages of their career with new knowledge and skills, through mobility across borders and exposure to different sectors and disciplines. The MSCA help build Europe’s capacity for research and innovation by investing in the long-term careers of excellent researchers.
The MSCA also fund the development of excellent doctoral and postdoctoral training programmes and collaborative research projects worldwide. By doing so, they achieve a structuring impact on higher education institutions, research centres and non-academic organisations.
The MSCA promote excellence and set standards for high-quality researcher education and training in line with the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the recruitment of researchers.
The visionary aspects and exploratory characteristics of FET might make it sound like a kind of magic, but the mission of FET is actually very concrete: to turn Europe's excellent science base into a competitive advantage. FET actions are expected to initiate radically new lines of technology through unexplored collaborations between advanced multidisciplinary science and cutting-edge engineering. It will help Europe grasp leadership early on in those promising future technology areas able to renew the basis for future European competitiveness and growth, and that can make a difference for society in the decades to come.
Under Horizon 2020, FET actions have been allocated a provisional budget of 2 696 million euro.
The FET programme has three complementary lines of action to address different methodologies and scales, from new ideas to long-term challenges:
FET Open funds projects on new ideas for radically new future technologies, at an early stage when there are few researchers working on a project topic. This can involve a wide range of new technological possibilities, inspired by cutting-edge science, unconventional collaborations or new research and innovation practices.
FET Proactivenurtures emerging themes, seeking to establish a critical mass of European researchers in a number of promising exploratory research topics. This supports areas that are not yet ready for inclusion in industry research roadmaps, with the aim of building up and structuring new interdisciplinary research communities.
FET Flagships are 1-billion, 10-years initiatives where hundreds of excellent European researchers unite forces to focus on solving an ambitious scientific and technological challenge, like understanding the Human Brain or developing the new materials of the future, such as Graphene.
Among these Horizon 2020 EU-funded FET projects, the ones under Green Technologies are investigating on technologies of tomorrow for more sustainability. Below you can read more about FutureAgriculture, GOTSolar, HELENIC-REF and LIAR.
FutureAgricultureproposes an efficient metabolic bypass for photorespiration in plants which leads to the loss of CO2 and consequently to reduced growth yield. Using new enzyme based synthetic pathways to bypass photorespiration has the potential to significantly increase the photosynthetic efficiency, supporting higher yields of crop, a pressing need for a continually growing world population.
GOTSolar aims to develop the next generation of solar cells, solid-state perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Transparent and available in various colours PSCs will significantly broaden the traditional solar cell application area. Perovskite solar cells will be highly efficient, long-lasting and environmentally safe, which would make them a sustainable power source not only from the harvesting but also from the production point of view.
HELENIC-REF aims to the establishment of a new sustainable methodology for the water thermolysis at temperatures below 300°C and the immediate corresponding production of energy or fuels, using water as a source for renewable fuel.
LIAR (Living Architecture) plans to develop a programmable bioreactor able to extract valuable resources from waste water and air and to generate oxygen, proteins and fibre. Its possible installation in domestic, public and office settings will significantly improve the environmental performance of our living spaces with undeniable benefits for health, productivity and ecosystems.
LIAR (Living Architecture) plans to develop a programmable bioreactor able to extract valuable resources from waste water and air and to generate oxygen, proteins and fibre. Its possible installation in domestic, public and office settings will significantly improve the environmental performance of our living spaces with undeniable benefits for health, productivity and ecosystems.
Objective
Living Architecture (LIAR) is a modular bioreactor-wall, which is based on the operational principles of microbial fuel cell technology and synthetic ‘consortia’ of microbes. LIAR is conceived as a next-generation selectively-programmable bioreactor and integral component of human dwelling, capable of extracting valuable resources from waste water and air, generation of oxygen and production of proteins and fiber by manipulating consortia performance. Its operational principles are grounded in distributed sensing, decentralised autonomous information processing, high-degree of fault-tolerance and distributed actuation and reconfiguration. Applications within urban systems are examined as a form of customizable micro-agriculture for installation in domestic, public (schools, hospitals) and office environments. Such a system has far reaching impacts on the building performance (resilience, resource recycling) manufacturing and design with ecosystems.
The project establishes:
• Foundational concepts through which ‘designed’ metabolisms can computationally process, recycle, remediate and synthesise valuable compounds from waste water.
• Transferable principles by which synthetic ecosystems can shape the environmental performance of our living spaces to increase our health, productivity and ecosystems impact.
• New standards for synthetic ‘ecosystems’ through consortia design, engineering and optimization.