UrbanA Community of Practice

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The UrbanA Community of Practice (CoP) is an open network of individuals committed to taking constructive action on urban social inequality and ecological unsustainability in the ambition to create more just and sustainable cities.

This page is part of an ongoing, open-ended online collaborative database, which collects relevant approaches that can be used by city-makers to tackle unsustainability and injustice in cities. This page makes no claims of authoritative completeness and welcomes your suggestions.

What is a Community of Practice (CoP)?

UrbanA Community of Practice

A Community of Practice is a group of people who share a common interest and who collaborate and learn together about how to develop this interest and apply it in practice. An UrbanA Community of Practice case study was written in September 2020. Like any other community of practice, the UrbanA CoP has the three main elements:

A shared interest – in this case justice and sustainability in cities.

A community that shares this interest – all active participants in, contributors to and followers of the project.

What the community undertakes together – ongoing engagement in UrbanA through the four Arena events, UrbanA side events and other project activities.

Who is part of the UrbanA Community of Practice?

Degrees of participation in the UrbanA CoP

The structure of the UrbanA CoP can be represented as a series of concentric circles, each indicating different levels of engagement (see diagram). The most central circles represent the highest levels of commitment to and involvement in the project.

- At the centre are the project consortium, who have a professional commitment to management and delivery of the project over its three-year duration

- UrbanA Fellows commit to attend all four Arena events and actively contribute to other CoP activities such as writing blog posts and hosting online events.

- Beyond this are other Arena participants, then people not participating in arenas themselves but following the project and reading or otherwise its outputs, and finally all those whose lives are indirectly touched by UrbanA's contributions to urban sustainability and justice.

The UrbanA CoP is sustained on an ongoing basis by targeted communications activities and social learning processes. UrbanA Community Conversations are interactive webinars that occurred every 2/3 weeks during a section of the UrbanA project (2019 - 2020) focusing on urban justice and sustainability. UrbanA side events saw the UrbanA CoP participate in wider conferences, festivals and movements. These webinars as well as UrbanA tools, reports, podcasts, blogs and participation in wider events, all to be collated on the UrbanA website, are developed together by the UrbanA consortium and the wider UrbanA CoP members, with the final aim of building a stronger community. An UrbanA CoP PDF was prepared for the Barcelona Arena in June 2020.

How can you join the UrbanA Community of Practice?

Join the UrbanA discussion. Become a member of our UrbanA CoP LinkedIn group and the Urban Sustainability and Justice Forum on the Communities for Future (CfF) action platform. There we share anything relevant to our community and we initiate discussions.

Join our UrbanA Community Conversations on Zoom. These are not classic “only-listen-webinars”, the participatory component is essential to us: we want to give as much space as possible to questions, comments and exchange. You can find the last updates on when the next webinar takes place on our website and Twitter account, or by checking the #UrbanACoCo hashtag.

Participate in UrbanA side events. Starting out as pre event before each of the 4 main arenas, they have developed to investigations of UrbanA findings with local communities in consortium member cities and include film nights, urban tours and participation in wider conferences and festivals.

Contribute to the Wiki on Just and Sustainable cities. Together we have created the Wiki on Just and Sustainable cities, an important part of UrbanA’s knowledge commons. Anytime you want, you can create a Wiki account, and contribute to this knowledge! Read this call for co-creation to know more.

Subscribe to our newsletter. We won’t spam you. We send a newsletter every couple of months as a recap to UrbanA’s most important updates. Subscribe here and see here the past newsletter.

Listen to our Podcasts. The UrbanA Podcasts are available on the main systems, like Spotify and from our website. If you're feeling really motivated, you can take the UrbanA Challenge.

Follow our social & multimedia. You find us on Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Youtube, Facebook and we have a lot of good content on our website too. You can also read our publications and our news blogs - all about urban justice and sustainability.