VARCITIES

In an increasingly urbanised world, cities face several challenges and threats and struggle to propose credible urban futures and new opportunities for their citizens. VARCITIES is an ambitious project that puts the citizens and the “human communities” at the centre of future cities’ vision, in the belief that future cities should become fully human-centred.The vision of VARCITIES is to implement real, visionary ideas and add value by establishing sustainable models for increasing the health and well-being of citizens: women, children, young people, middle aged, and the elderly, who are exposed to diverse climatic conditions and challenges in and around Europe. VARCITIES sets the ambitious target to advance innovation across different urban scales by fully exploiting nature-based solutions from a digital, social and cultural perspective. Public spaces are envisioned as people-centered areas that support creativity, inclusivity, health, and happiness for the citizens.

There is a growing acknowledgement of the role that nature plays in our society and many countries are already taking action to include NbS and digital solutions in their national climate strategies at reaching EU climate neutrality. However, there is still a lack of systemic integration between nature-based, social, cultural, and digital innovation and these actions are not always developed and implemented based on the best criteria and practices available. Moreover, good practices are often not sufficiently described, which means that their descriptions lack relevant information that complicates further use. 

The aim of the visionary solutions is to provide innovative and comprehensive solutions at the intersection of social, cultural, digital, and nature-based innovation in order to improve the health and well-being of citizens. The need of defining guidelines for visionary solution development is to capture existing knowledge about successful methods, projects, and activities and to make this knowledge available for future reuse and replication. Building on existing experiences of cities that faced several challenges, the Standard provides a systematic learning framework to improve and evolve the applications, leading to greater confidence in visionary solutions among decision makers.  

The framework provides guidance in describing, designing, implementing and evaluating good practices for all types of visionary solutions. Cities, designers, planners and other practitioners can follow this framework to develop and document a good practice fully in a structured way. Consequently, the Standard provides an opportunity to create a common understanding on visionary solutions beneficial for health and wellbeing and a shared vision for a just and sustainable world. 

Reason for applying to HSbooster.eu services

A standardisation document developed in a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) is envisaged in the VARCITIES project. Based on this, our primary focus is on applying for a Standardisation Booster service to assist us in locating a CEN secretariat and supporting the dissemination of the CWA.