A look back at the Time2Adapt’s opening visit

A little reminder on what is the Time2Adapt project

We already introduced you to this project in our February Newsletter. As a reminder, the Time2Adapt project was selected during the first call for projects of the European Urban Initiative - Innovative Actions (EUI-IA) in September 2023. It aims to test solutions for adapting to the effects of climate change by focusing on temporal policies.

Led by Lille Metropole’s “Time Office”, the project is a forerunner in Europe in terms of adapting to climate change, with its innovative time-based approach to public policy. Through this project, Lille Metropole and its local partners wants to help inhabitants to cope better with the periods of extreme heat that are becoming more and more frequent during the summer.

The EUI-IA programme newly approach includes a transferring component. The objective is that project outputs are replicated and scaled up by other European cities. The impact of the whole initiative will then be increased. The three Transfer Partners chosen for this project are the city of Dresden (Germany), the city of Middelburg (The Netherlands), and Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (Spain).

Deep diving into the project with insightful site visits

During the two-day site visit, the partners were able to explore the innovative aspect of the project in the two cities of the metropolis (Lille and Loos) where the project is firstly implemented. During a second phase of the project, other cities will be offered to participate as well. The objective of the second phase is to disseminate the innovative solution across the territory to volunteer cities with different size and degree of urbanisation.

In particular, partners visited on the first day several gardens and recently refurbished cool spots in the city of Lille such as:

- ‘Les Pyramides’, an urban park where a temporary cooling installation was installed (see photo below) ;

- ‘Maison Folie Moulins’, a cultural centre where a hidden garden was pre-existent and the SEED association (local partner of the project) developed a temporary refreshing furniture ;

- ‘Jean Lévy’ media library equipped with a garden and can be part of the places that host experiments in 2025 ;

- ‘Palais des Beaux-Arts’, Fine arts museum where extra garden space was open to the public this summer and can be part of the places that host experiments in 2025.

The second day of the visit focused on visits of vegetated schoolyards in the city of Loos. Some of them were opened to the public this summer or will be open next year.

In addition of this site visits, several working meetings were scheduled. These meetings gave Lille Metropole and its local partners the opportunity to discuss future working relationships with Transfer Partners in collaboration with EUI experts.

The next steps will be to visit Transfer Partners in 2025, get inspiration from their own local context and discuss how best to transfer the innovative aspects of the Time2Adapt project.