TURNS seed and mobility funding 2026
TURNS Management Group made the decisions about this year’s TURNS seed and mobility funding on its meeting on 3 March 2026. TURNS has decided to fund 12 applications, including 7 seed initiatives and 5 mobility initiatives. The applications were evaluated based on how well they met the purposes and criteria of the funding call: TURNS Funding Call 2026. You can read more about the funded initiatives below.
In the 2026 call, TURNS received 51 funding applications, out of which 23 were for seed funding and 28 for mobility funding. The total budget was 100 000 euro, while the applied sum was 425 000 euro. The call round was very competitive, so only 30 % of the seed applications and 18 % of mobility applications could be funded. We want to thank everyone for the effort they have put in preparing the proposals and for the evaluators for evaluating the applications.
TURNS seed funding 2026
By main applicant.
Luiz Alonso de Andrade: Co-production of Sustainable Urban Security (COPSUS)
COPSUS examines how security perception is co-produced through formal, informal, and unintentional collaboration between public authorities, civil society, and citizens across different urban settings. The project aims to understand the ways in which these arrangements contribute to social sustainability considering diverse social groups.
Himansu Mishra: Co-Governance of Multispecies Neighbourhood Spaces (CoMmoNS+)
CoMmoNS+ prepares a Horizon Europe 2026 proposal for neighbourhood-scale multispecies co-governance and innovative approaches to spatial design of neighbourhoods with strong empirical and conceptual justification. It pilots innovative, inclusive methods to support fair green and biodiversity transitions aligned with New European Bauhaus values.
Paulina Nordström: A research project about global rooftop urbanism
A seed initiative aimed at developing a research network and a research proposal for a significant ERC Starting Grant, examining the creative, imaginative, and everyday practices of global rooftop urbanism.
Tiina Rinne: Adding Health-Promoting and Health-Harming Participatory Mapping Data to Strengthen Multispecies Urban Wellbeing Research
This project maps health promoting and -harming urban places to better understand multispecies wellbeing. By integrating participatory mapping data with environmental data and assessment of the pollinator diversity and wellbeing, it advances tools for planning urban environments that support both human and pollinator health.
Derek Ruez: Sustaining critique: Universities as critical urban spaces amidst socio-economic transitions
Contributing to research on universities as spaces of critique and as urban-sustainability actors, this project examines universities as critical urban spaces vital to sustainable socio-economic transitions. The funding would support pilot research and proposal development for external funding bids.
Yanai Toister: Seeing with the City: Civic Access to the AV Sensorium
Autonomous vehicles ‘see’ the city via networked sensors and maps, but this machine vision is largely closed to pedestrians. This project asks how publics can gain civic access to the AV sensorium—so urban perception becomes legible, accountable, and contestable.
Kaisa Väänänen: Embodied AI agents for co-design of urban sustainability activities with citizens
Urban sustainability requires active citizen participation. Emerging AI agents have conversational capabilities that can engage diverse people in urban design activities. This seed funding study explores how AI agents can be embodied in social robots to advance urban sustainability design.
TURNS Mobility Funding
Aino Ahtinen (Reykjavík University, Iceland, 2 weeks)
Hsiao-Chun Lin (Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark, 2 weeks)
Hamed Mazaherylaghab (Université de Strasbourg, France, 2 weeks)
Matias Rokio (University of Sydney, Australia, 8 weeks)
Jiangnan Xu (Yonsei University, South Korea, 8 weeks)