Teaching Event 3: Reflecting, Connecting, and Concluding Our Learning Journey

On 14 November, the PSUGO project held Teaching Event 3 (TE3) — the final session in the project’s training cycle! — bringing together students, researchers, and ULL participants from Naples, Palermo, Cottbus, and Nicosia for an afternoon of shared reflection. Hosted online via Zoom and facilitated by Dafne Berc, Layla Munitić, and Tomislav Augustinčić from SF:ius (Croatia), TE3 marked an important moment of consolidation, exchange, and collective learning.

TE3 was designed as a knowledge-transfer workshop, offering participants the opportunity to revisit experiences from previous Teaching Events and to connect insights gained across the four Urban Living Labs. Rather than focusing solely on outcomes, the session invited participants to reflect on the evolving meaning of participation, community engagement, and urban transformation within the PSUGO framework.
The workshop combined small-group discussions and collective feedback with a digital collaborative tool used to gather impressions, highlight key challenges, and surface shared priorities. This interactive approach encouraged openness and dialogue among participants with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Participants highlighted how the Urban Living Labs strengthened their understanding of participation as an active, situated practice — one that requires time, trust-building, and continuous dialogue with local communities. Many emphasized the value of working across different disciplines and cities, noting that the diversity of contexts helped them compare approaches and broaden their ideas of what “transformation” can mean in practice.

Students also reflected on challenges encountered during the ULL activities, including limited resources, the complexity of translating ideas into concrete action, and the varying levels of community engagement across sites. Yet these challenges were also seen as important learning moments, reinforcing the need for flexibility, creativity, and mutual support.
Looking ahead, participants expressed a strong desire for continuity: maintaining the networks formed during PSUGO, expanding opportunities for hands-on collaboration, and ensuring that the interventions and ideas developed within the ULLs can continue to grow beyond the project’s formal timeline. The concluding sentiment across the Mentimeter responses was clear — PSUGO has fostered a meaningful learning community, one that participants hope will extend into future practice, research, and local initiatives.

As the final event in the TE series, TE3 concluded the structured training component of PSUGO, but not the collaborative spirit behind it. The reflections collected will feed into the project’s upcoming dissemination activities and into the ongoing development of the ULLs as spaces of experimentation, dialogue, and local empowerment.
PSUGO extends its sincere gratitude to all students, researchers, mentors, and community partners who contributed to the teaching events and to the work of the Urban Living Labs. TE3 demonstrated once again that meaningful transformation begins with conversation, reflection, and shared commitment.
We look forward to continuing this journey together as PSUGO moves into its next stages.