From risk to resilience: how RETIME and European clustering projects joined forces at Sustainable Places 2025 conference

On 9 October 2025, representatives from five Horizon Europe projects of Resilience of the Built Environment cluster – Minority Report, RETIME, MULTICLIMACT, MULTICARE and CLIMRES – met at the Sustainable Places 2025 conference in Milan to discuss how Europe can build stronger, more resilient communities  by developing integrated resilience strategies that combine technical, social, and policy innovations to safeguard people, buildings, and cities.

Through a group discussion and a hands-on mapping exercise, participants shared tools, methods, and experiences from across Europe. What emerged was a shared understanding that resilience works best when digital innovation, design, policy, and community engagement are connected rather than treated separately.

During the workshop, participants were split into teams and ideas were shared through an interactive mapping exercise, where sticky notes were then grouped by theme and connections between them were identified. Across all teams, several common themes stood out:

• Digital sensing, modelling, and design solutions work best when integrated into multi-hazard frameworks
• Feedback loops – from post-event learning to citizen-generated data – are essential for adaptive governance
• Resilience requires not only technology but also effective policies, stable funding, and community participation

The workshop groups highlighted several key insights. They stressed the importance of evidence-based building retrofits and the need to link surveys with policy. Participants also explored how digital tools, nature-based solutions, and community knowledge can come together to build a coherent resilience ecosystem. Finally, they underscored the importance of ethics and governance, emphasising transparency and trust as essential pillars of digital resilience.

Building Europe’s urban resilience together
This workshop reflected new emerging European priorities such as from the digitalization of information, systems thinking, and deeper community engagement. While challenges like data gaps and funding constraints remain, participants saw strong opportunities for Europe to take the lead in developing scalable, multi-hazard resilience strategies. In this context, the five clustering projects showed that resilience is not just about responding to crises; it is about continuous learning, collaboration, and empowering a wide range of stakeholders. Their involvment marks an important step towards a safer and more climate-resilient built environment across Europe.