Urban Innovative Actions (UIA)

In the 2014-2020 programming period, UIA funded 86 pilot projects that identified and tested new solutions to address issues related to sustainable urban development. The main objective of UIA was to provide city authorities across Europe with the support and funding to experiment with new innovative responses to their interconnected and complex local challenges. The UIA enabled cities to turn ambitious and creative ideas into prototypes that could be tested in real urban environments. In other words, UIA supported pilot projects that were too risky to be financed by traditional funding sources , provided they were highly innovative and experimental. UIA also ran capitalisation activities on the most successful experiments and facilitate their up-scaling and transfer to other urban areas across the EU. The initiative's legacy lives on by knowledge capitalisation activities to further harness the results and lessons learned from the experience of UIA funded projects and communicated these results with the broader audience in the format of reports, articles, webinars and workshops.