BackgroundCOOLSCHOOLS is a three-year project that will start on the 1st of March 2022. The COOLSCHOOLS consortium encompasses 16 partners from 5 countries: Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, France and Serbia.
COOLSCHOOLS is a transdisciplinary applied urban research project that examines the transformative potential of nature-based solutions (NBS) to support the creation of climate shelters in European school environments. We assess how nature-based climate shelters can drive social-ecological transformations towards urban sustainability, climate resilience, social justice, and quality education at multiple urban scales and translate them into practical building capacity for school communities and beyond. Building on pioneering pilot NBS projects of school transformation in Barcelona, Brussels, Paris, and Rotterdam, COOLSCHOOLS unravels the specificities of each context and finds common patterns related to climate shelters transformation capacities, focusing on marginalized groups. Through participatory and co-creation methodologies, we propose an interdisciplinary approach that combines natural, bio-medical, social and education sciences. To further promote a holistic approach to school climate shelters transformation capacities, we will actively disseminate the pilots' best practices and key learnings among city governments, urban planners, companies, school communities and other relevant stakeholders. The consortium's cross-sectoral composition ensures active multi-stakeholder involvement through an urban living lab and other co-engagement actions, that are planned to boost reflection and learning, and the wider use of COOLSCHOOLS outputs.
We will mainly work on one work package (WP4: Socio-cultural transformations) and contribute to almost all other. WP4 investigates the role of perception of quality and safety of school climate shelters to determine the capacity of these NBS to initiate socio-cultural transformations of school environments and wider neighbourhoods through exploring and validating the interactive approach of Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) with users.
Your tasks include contributing to:
- identifying the state-of-the-art relationship between perceived safety and quality/amenity characteristics of NBS;
- unearthing the impact of NBS qualities/ amenities and safety aspects on the use of public space and climate shelters;
- sharing and reflecting with the school communities about NBS safety and quality characteristics, and their related potential as climate shelters;
- analysing the FCM network data as scenarios and identifying the potential of certain qualities of the climate shelters in initiating a socio-cultural transformation of the school environment and neighbourhood.