Unite! Seed Fund 2024 awards funding to three collaborative teaching projects involving Aalto
The Unite! Seed Fund aims to stimulate and support bottom-up proposals by teachers, researchers and students for collaborative activities.
The QUORUM project addresses urban water and climate challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration within Unite! universities
The increasing frequency of natural disasters, especially in relation to water and climate change, emphasises the need to consolidate interdisciplinary collaboration towards transformative sustainable solutions. The project Quest for Urban Obdurate Resilience in Uncertain Milieus (QUORUM) has received funding from the Unite! Seed Fund for Teaching and Learning to design a study module plan addressing water-related urban challenges.
Climate change has turned cities globally into uncertain milieus. This results in increasing pressure on education and research to support through interdisciplinary collaborations towards transformative sustainable solutions. In the QUORUM project, we explore co-designing an interdisciplinary module to address water-related challenges and focus on revisiting urban rivers as culturally embedded components and ecosystem service providers.
“The Unite! seed fund enabled an interdisciplinary, international team to initiate the QUORUM project, which will explore innovative learning to address resilient water-related solutions within uncertain urban milieus,” says Christine Mady, the project coordinator.
The project’s outcome is a co-designed graduate-level student module plan, which is offered within different programmes, to support students’ collaborative, multicultural, interdisciplinary activities in addressing urban rivers’ sustainable transformations.
Partners
The team includes experts from five Unite! partner universities. The team members are actively engaged in interdisciplinary research and teaching related to climate crisis.
- Christine Mady, Project Coordinator, Senior University Lecturer, Aalto University
- Paulo Pinho, Senior University Lecturer, Aalto University
- Andrea Botero, Associate Professor, Aalto University
- Elena Comino, Associate Professor, Politecnico di Torino
- Sérgio Proença, Assistant Professor, Universidade de Lisboa
- Álvaro Clua, Tenure-track lecturer, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
- Arnold Pears, Professor, Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan
Contact
See also
Unite! University Alliance
Aalto University is a member of Unite! alliance together with eight other European universities.
Read more news
If you work from home, use VPN to access services - some services closed (Wed 21 Oct, 2026)
Some of Aalto’s web services have been temporarily closed or restricted to Aalto’s internal network.
THIS ’N’ THAT Exhibition: Workshop Masters' exhibition until 18.11.2026
School of Arts, Design and Architecture's Workshop Masters’ exhibition showcases the school’s diverse workshop activities and the craftsmanship of the workshop masters.
Join the Aalto Innovation Week community events
Aalto Innovation Week, taking place in Otaniemi from 16 to 20 November 2026, brings together events focused on entrepreneurship and innovation. Members of the Aalto community are warmly welcome to attend the events organised for the community.