Thematic Line 3 - Urban Resilience and Smart Cities

Advancing innovation and resilience through collaborative research, engaged learning, and smart technologies

The Thematic Line on Urban Resilience & Smart Cities brings together experts, students, researchers, and city stakeholders across the UNIC Alliance to collaboratively address the challenges and opportunities facing Europe’s post-industrial cities.
From climate resilience and sustainable urban infrastructure to digital innovation and smart governance, this thematic line supports cutting-edge research, co-creation, and innovation that enhances the sustainability, livability, and inclusivity of urban spaces.



UNIC's seven cross-cutting Thematic Lines are interlocking collaborative structures that establish relations between faculties of our universities around specific areas of post-industrial transition.


Topics covered by UNIC's thematic lines include health and wellbeing, sustainability, resilience and digitization, security, inclusion, entrepreneurship, and arts. They are communities of researchers and educators within UNIC that provide the contents for UNIC’s innovation in education, engagement, and cooperation capacities. Find out more about our Thematic Lines and get involved!


The work is rooted in UNIC’s commitment to superdiversity, sustainability, and community engagement, ensuring that smart city solutions are inclusive, socially responsive, and environmentally conscious. Our key focus areas include:

Climate ResilienceAdapting urban infrastructure and services to climate change impacts through nature-based solutions, green infrastructure, and smart monitoring.

Smart TechnologiesUsing digital tools such as IoT, big data, and AI to enhance urban governance, transport, energy management, and public services.

Citizen EngagementCo-creating solutions with diverse urban populations through UNIC CityLabs and engaged research projects.

Sustainable MobilityDeveloping smart, green mobility options that reduce emissions and improve access for all citizens.

Post-Industrial TransformationExploring how cities with industrial legacies can embrace innovation while addressing historical inequalities.

Ongoing and Past Projects


Introductory Course on Resilience

This project focuses on developing an undergraduate-level course (5 ECTS) that introduces the core themes and dimensions of resilience studies, with a specific focus on post-industrial cities through contextual analysis and case examples. As a MOOC, the course will be fully online and accessible to all UNIC partner universities.


The course is supported by textbook development and is expected to include approximately 22 hours of online teaching, alongside self-directed learning and reporting tasks. The final structure will evolve throughout the project.


Key project tasks include designing the core curriculum and defining learning goals, developing educational materials that build a theoretical and conceptual foundation in resilience studies, applying this foundation to the context of post-industrial cities, collecting and developing case studies from partner universities and cities, potentially involving local City partners, recording lectures with contributions from UNIC partner universities and city representatives, and creating an interactive online platform to host materials and facilitate participation from students and lecturers.

Resilience policies around UNIC cities and regions


The main objective of this project is the production of original knowledge on resilience policies in all UNIC cities and make it available to researchers amongst UNIC Universities and city and region stakeholders or representatives. The action will set up a joint conceptual framework on urban resilience, understand and compare urban resilience policies in ten urban contexts (UNIC Cities and regions). This comparative analysis has been presented and discussed with cities and regions representatives during online workshops during winter 2024/2025. Ultimately, knowledge will be shared during the UNIC Thematic conference in Malmö in spring 2025, made available in the resilience textbook (see action 3) and included in the introductory course on resilience.


Key project tasks include collecting climate resilience policies among UNIC Cities and establishing a list of key stakeholders and experts in the field, followed by qualitative analysis of collected policies, a local Citylab in Liège to consolidate results with experts from the City of Liège, online workshops to consolidate results for other UNIC Cities, and presentation of the results and the conceptual framework at the UNIC thematic conference Malmö, May 2025.


Resilience in Post-Industrial European Cities: Edited Book project


As part of UNIC TL3 Urban Resilience and Smart Cities, this project aims to produce an open-access edited book supporting UNIC’s resilience-focused online course. With contributions from various UNIC partner universities, the book will explore resilience in post-industrial European cities. A dedicated workshop will take place at the UNIC Malmö Conference on May 8 to further develop this initiative.


Get Involved

Students: Join Urban Resilience courses, CityLabs, & exchange programs.
Researchers: Collaborate across UNIC cities for comparative studies.
Cities & NGOs: Partner with UNIC to pilot smart, inclusive solutions.

Get in Touch


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