6th UfM Advisory Group Meeting: Schools of Architecture of the Euro-Mediterranean Region

22-23 May 2025, Chania, Crete, Greece. The 6^th Meeting of the “UfM Advisory Group Meeting – Network of Schools of Architecture of the Euro-Mediterranean Region”, will build on the concrete outcomes of this cooperation, and serve to further consolidate the group with a view to create consortiums of schools from the region to participate in EU calls among other joint activities.

The Advisory Group aims to set in motion the process of review and update of curriculums of schools across the region, improving teaching methodologies to better respond to the common challenges the region is facing, while promoting links between academia, students of architecture and the public sector in the region, benefitting to this end of the opportunities that the European Commission offers to universities.

Concrete outcomes of the discussions held so far on the margins of the meetings have been a joint COST proposal submitted in October 2023 entitled “Assembling Mediterranean Polycrises to Reimagine and Codesign an Adaptive Southern Urbanism” (POLYSMED), ERASMUS+ proposals, and the “UfM Student Competition on Urban Design: Urban Solutions to Climate Change in the Mediterranean”.

The upcoming meeting will resume the discussions held in Barcelona (23 May 2022), Ankara (1-2 December 2022), Tirana (18-19 May 2023), Ben Guerir (30-31 May 2024) and Brussels (21-22 November 2024).

Policy background

The UfM Urban Agenda and the UfM Strategic Urban Development Action Plan 2040 provide a roadmap for addressing challenges of urban development around the Mediterranean and proposes evidence-based, integrated and participatory education, focusing on the contextualisation of global policies such as the SDGs and the mutually reinforcing relationship between sustainable, fair, and inclusive urbanization.

The Action Plan highlights the key dimension of the science-policy interface for boosting planning and design capacity in the region. Universities across the Euro-Mediterranean region are seen as catalysts of this process, providing on-the-job training to planning professionals, through lifelong learning programmes (LLPs) and educating the next generation of urban planners and designers. Local universities must build bridges between science and research on the one hand, and public authorities, spatial policies and urban interventions on the other.