Funded By
ERDF
86 projects
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About

The Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) is a European Union initiative that provided funding to urban areas across Europe to test new and unproven solutions to urban challenges. The initiative had a total ERDF budget of €372 million for 2014-2020.

Type of service
Funding
Networking and knowledge sharing
Research, development, innovation
Urban themes covered

Target audience

The UIA target audience was threefold:

  • EU urban authorities, including UIA beneficiaries (urban authorities with a population of 50 000 or more, or groupings of local authorities with a total population of 50 000 or more, located in an EU Member State);
  • Urban practitioners and policy makers, Cohesion Policy stakeholders and beneficiaries, i.e. cities implementing sustainable urban development strategies,
  • Managing authorities and/or intermediate bodies in charge of programmes covering these strategies and the wider community of Cohesion policy beneficiaries at local and regional levels interested in learning from, or replicating successful UIA experiences.
Learn more about the partner

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.

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