TRANSFORMERS is a DAAD higher education dialogue between Germany and Italy about the role and agency of cities to reach climate neutrality, combining this change with social and economic progress. The project focuses on the interrelation and dynamics between urban fabric and society, and establishes a joint search for new transformative knowledge, for cities as laboratories of openness, innovation, and entrepreneurship. It builds on recent research in Italy and Germany and cooperates with three cities as case studies and stages for new formats of open science in communication and involvement. Here, the project creates a space of European dialogue that involves researchers, professors, doctoral candidates, and students from Italy and Germany and connects them with interdisciplinary and local experts and citizens, further enriched with international expertise from additional countries in Southern Europe. Public events in the three cities are combined with the academic formats of the project.

TRANSFORMERS aims at new models for the role and agency of cities and is putting the expertise of urban designers, urban planners, and architects under examination: which attitudes, abilities, and approaches do TRANSFORMERS need to initiate, steer, and realise urban transition towards resilience and sustainability? How can urban design, urban planning, and architecture contribute to green economy and digitalisation, and to a cultural change how to understand cities, to project and organise their transition? The project aims to establish a network between the cooperating partners that already in the project is extended to further universities and to cities, and that is enriched through the involvement of doctoral candidates and master students in order to foster the research process through their perspectives, to immediately transfer research into education, and to involve young people in the profiling of their own future as TRANSFORMERS. And the project aims to involve cities and urban society not only through specific formats of public events in the course of the project: local knowledge, input and dialogue with experts and citizens contribute to an overall transdisciplinary research process, which aims to generate transformative knowledge for urban transition and a sustainable turn of architecture. The project will articulate three approaches that are developed and interrelated throughout its activities: Urban Circular Design, Community Making, and Architecture for Just Transition.