PIONEER is an Alliance of European Universities dedicated to SDG 11 'Sustainable Cities and Communities', addressing the need for cities to become inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The alliance brings together 10 impact-driven universities, including an associated Swiss partner, and covers 32 cities and 16 regions across Europe. By bringing together academics, public institutions, private organisations and citizens in our orchestration framework, we will develop joint challenge-based education, impact-driven research and innovation co-creation initiatives that contribute to many European, regional and urban agendas, such as the EU Green Deal and the 'Fit for 55' package. To this end, PIONEER will also be a facilitator of inter-institutional learning and a tool for institutional change. We will achieve this ambition through strategic integration at the institutional level: gradually aligning our individual strategies and institutional trajectories, building a common development strategy to become truly international institutions integrated in a federal framework.This framework will be inspired by the European Union, with a strong strategic centre that draws on and supports the diversity and autonomy of our partners to build a flexible and complementary academic ecosystem, while working together on a common strategy and development path. Committed to spreading European values and promoting inclusion and diversity, the PIONEER Open Campus will offer seamless mobility for students and unique leadership development opportunities for staff. Our Knowledge Hub will enable member universities and over 40 associated partners from regional ecosystems to work together on matters concerning SDG11.

The concept of “urban health” and the role of urban design in the quality promotion of the cities’ living spaces has been present in the international debate for some decades, but only since the publication of the “New Urban Agenda” (WHO 2016), health has been defined as “one of the most effective markers of any city’s sustainable development”. These aspects are beginning to be highly debated ona scientific level, but have not yet been introduced into university education. Moreover, the pandemic emergency we are experiencing imposes even more compelling reflection on the relationship between health and the city, and on the role of university research and education to understand what the city of the future will be like. Within this framework, Cli-CC.HE wants to promote an educational methodology and tools to deal with the effects of climate change on urban health and equity in teaching urban regeneration in European cities. Thanks to this project, EU universities and public administrations can train future experts able to plan interventions to limit climate change effects on health and equity in urban contexts.

The project aims to continue the activities developed in previous postdoctoral research projects. In precedent years, I have had a research work that begun in 2000 with South Asian transnational population from Gujarati origin and of Portuguese nationality, which focuses on issues related to migration, housing, transnational mobility and interurban mobility. A long-term ethnographic fieldwork was developed in the scope of PhD research (2004-2008) and postdoc researches (2009-2018). This long experience turned into a in depth perspective on qualitative methodologies concentrated on the collection of ethnographic materials of various kinds, an experience that has become into an interest centred on the history of Anthropology in general and of Urban Ethnography in particular, especially in the Portuguese context.  This is a central area to ensure the safeguarding of primary materials and to enable future generations of social scientists and descendants of families with whom researchers have worked, to access more organized archives and ethically and epistemologically reflected materials. The research for this project is centred on the practitioners of urban ethnography, contributing to the history, and in their practices, contributing to the method.

In doing so, we build on a constructivist understanding of experts’ knowledge, which conceives policy approaches as embodying ideological and value assumptions (Wagenaar 2011, Latour 2005, Callon et al 2009) and travelling between (and adapting to) to a variety of local contexts (Sanyal 2005, Knieling & Othengrafen 2009, Peck & Theodore 2010, Healey 2013), and sees experts’ role beyond the deployment of their professional skills (Fischer & Forester 1993, Hoppe 1999, Jasanoff 2003, Fischer 2009).

The project aims to consolidate the international network of collaboration between both teams around partner anthropological research on methods of collective social participation in Portuguese and Brazilian cities. This initiative of Luso-Brazilian exchange binds to two doctoral programs: Urban Studies (FCSH-UNL and ISCTE-IUL) and Postgraduate Anthropology Program (PPGA / UFF). The aim is to analyze the diversity of forms and practices of urban participation and how they mobilize and renew cultural, organizational, economic, political labor resources. This survey also wish to draw attention to activities that display scenarios, visibility and dispute in urban public space, challenging for advanced training in scientific thinking, but also the dissemination of public debate about different realities with a potential for comparability and dissemination of good practices.

This project aims to deconstruct a common image of ‘suburbia’ as a uniform space, where people live similar lives in similarplaces. In order to better understand the reality behind this stereotype we will inquiry into the hypothetical causal relationship between the intensity of urban sprawl and its negative effects in terms of ecological balance, social fragmentation and citizenship practices.

Com os Pés em Três Cidades: Maputo, Lisboa, Londres. Itinerários Residenciais e Mobilidade Inter-Urbana na Diáspora Hindu-Gujarati

More so than the topic, it is the street that is a problem to be identified and stated. The street can be seen as the minimum unit of city life, a place of sociability registering various levels and dimensions ? of action, interaction, differentiation and sociability; misbehaviour and social control; circulation and mutual acquaintance; meeting and confrontation; a space for the integration of functions (relating to residence, work and leisure), a territory steeped in memories, a social crossroads and the scene of and stage for different daily lives and individual, interacting trajectories and destinies. In its extensions (shops, associations, churches, squares, street corners and even houses) the street is viewed here as a possible synthesis of city life, a singular ethnographic sample for exploring and getting to know contemporary urban life from ?the bottom and the inside?. In this sense, the street does not emerge as a pre-defined unit but as an object to be defined and constructed throughout the research process itself, an observation unit with considerable social and cultural consistency and with comparison possibilities that add original knowledge to a theoretical reflection on the city and its specific socio-cultural dynamics. Methodologically, the research is organized around a set of social and culturally different case studies, both from the point of view of the topics and the ethnographic contexts involved.