VARCITIES 2nd Progress Meeting

September 21-22, 2021

VARCITIES 2nd Progress Meeting took place in Chania (Greece), on 21-22 September. This represents the very first in-person meeting of the project consortium. Despite not all the partners could join, it was an exciting and important moment! in fact, for some us this was the occasion to get to know each other for the first time.

The consortium meeting is organised in 2 days, including presentations from each Work Package and a final series of cross-learning workshops.

Day-1

On Day-1, Project Coordinator Denia Kolokotsa (Telecommunication System Institute) updated the partners about the overall management of the project and the most important achievements during the first year of VARCITIES.  For WP3, Adriano Bisello and colleagues from EURAC presented the work done on the guidelines to sketch the visionary solutions, and discussed the steps to complete the next deliverables. Michiel Dewagtere and Stefan Haenen (Prospex Institute) summarised the work done in order to organise the co-creation workshops and the overall co-creation Strategy, to be finalised by WP4 in February 2022; the next series of workshops with local stakeholders will take place in November 2021.  The programme continued with WP5: Neil Purshouse (IESRD) and Neil Baldacchino (Darttek) provided update about the design and development of the Health & Well-being Platform, showcasing some mock-up renders of the Pilot Cities. Lastly, Vassilios Albanis and Pat O’Sullivan (INLE) presented the work in WP8 related to exploitation, business model and commercialisation of the visionary solutions.

Day-2

Day-2 started with presentations from Work Packages 7 (KPI development, Monitoring and Evaluation), 6 (Visionary solutions implementation) and 9 (Dissemination and Communication).

Daniel Micallef, Daniela Quacinella and Kurt Kalleja from University of Malta discussed the advancement in terms of KPI developments. Elena Goni from E2ARC introduced the co-design phase of the project: the concept of the visionary solutions will be ready by February 2022, while the implementation plan will be completed by August 2022. Andreea Petra (Crowdhelix) and Federico Aili (ISOCARP Institute) provided an update about the communication and dissemination activities.

In the afternoon, Michiel Dewagtere and Stefan Haenen (Prospex Institute) organised and coordinated a series of cross-learning workshops.

Are you interested or actively engaged in shaping a healthier and sustainable future for your city? Then follow us and let’s stay in contact!

For any question or information regarding VARCITIES, please contact us at contact@varcities.eu