CORDIS Archive

The City of Tomorrow and Culture Heritage

The City of Tomorrow and Cultural Heritage Key Action aims to improve urban sustainability through delivering real, noticeable benefits to citizens throughout the EU by 2010. It will achieve this:

• by concentrating these resources on four specific areas

  • city planning and management,
  • cultural heritage,
  • built environment,
  • urban transport,

  where action is urgently required, and where there is untapped technological potential and strong demand for new solutions from cities themselves

• by focusing primarily on the integration and co-ordination of outputs from other EU and national research programmes, thus avoiding duplication of effort

• by selecting only projects likely to have significant impacts, regionally and at European level, managing and clustering them with a view to practical implementation and the transferability of their results

• by ensuring appropriate end-user involvement, and creating transnational networks with the capacity, opportunity and motivation to continue to exploit and disseminate results after the research phase is completed

The Key Action has thus been specifically designed to ensure rapid, EU-wide take-up of practical new approaches to urban governance, planning and management. It is expected to produce, within a decade, measurable advances in economic development, environmental performance and quality of life which will directly benefit the 80% of EU citizens who now live in cities and large towns.