Sustainable, accessible, safe, resilient and smart urban pavements
Urban pavements comprise almost 40% of European cities and are the main means by which people travel every day. Urban pavements must accommodate all users in the most efficient, safe, sustainable and smart way. A key factor to increase the liveability of tomorrow’s Smart cities will be transforming the way urban pavements are perceived, designed, built, maintained and function. SAFERUP! aims to provide cities with innovative solutions that will form the future urban paved environment, by training talented researchers in the fields of: smart, recycled and durable paving materials; provision for vulnerable users (e.g. elderly & disabled) accessibility and protection; studying user behaviour; life cycle analysis; wash-off water management and bioremediation; tempered and acoustic pavements; energy harvesting and self-sensing technologies. The SAFERUP! Consortium believes in this future and has created a unique team of world leading commercial and academic research engineers and scientists, with the diverse range of expertise needed to develop the novel solutions required to deliver this future and its anticipated benefits. Fifteen ESRs will undertake their PhDs in a research and training programme designed to optimise their multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral experience through secondments and a variety of SAFERUP!-wide fora. All ESRs’ projects are interrelated and considerable synergies, trans-project contributions and collaborations will occur. A key focus of the training will be career planning, entrepreneurship and skills development in particular communication. SAFERUP! participants with communication expertise will develop the communication and dissemination strategy to maximise the exploitation of the developed solutions. SAFERUP! will create a new generation of professionals with multidisciplinary expertise in urban pavements and allied fields appealing to employers, who will expand the social benefits of the new urban pavements well beyond the end of SAFERUP!