Green Week Open Days welcome over 60 visitors at Co-UDlabs facilities
At the end of June 2024, the European Union has supported hundreds of initiatives across the continent to give visibility and centrality to green transitions, infrastructure, and community activities in the framework of its yearly Green Week. Co-UDlabs has participated in the campaign with two events at the University of A Coruña: an Open Days initiative to open the doors of UDC’s facilities to the larger public, and an applied course on metrology in urban drainage, which will take place on July 16-19, 2024.
For the Green Week Open Days, Co-UDlabs’ facilities at UDC’s Center for Technological Innovation in Construction and Civil Engineering (CITEEC) have been welcoming visitors for two days – on June 19 and 20 – with a free tour of the laboratories and a hands-on experience for all kinds of public.
The experience was very fruitful and rewarding for Co-UDlabs, with over 60 people visiting the laboratories during the Open Days. Visiting groups included children and school pupils, technicians and practitioners from academic institutions and the private sector, community members, and enthusiasts. Besides the STREET and BLOCK facilities available for Co-UDlabs’ Transnational Access programme, at the Open Days visitors had access to the Medusa facility — an integral model of the urban water cycle of A Coruña, with a catchment area, a dense network of pipes with a number of sensors and monitoring devices, and a wastewater treatment model for water re-circulation — and two augmented-reality installations: an exhibition sandbox simulating floods and water behaviour on moldable terrains for educational purposes; and the TopoSandbox project, an augmented-reality facility to run hybrid physical-numerical flood models.
The event was also featured in the local press, and has contributed to make community and residents closer to the great potential for research, innovation, and dissemination that the CITEEC laboratories have for local growth. Raising such institutions from their ‘hidden gem’ — making them known to a larger audience as well as to new users and researchers — has been one of the great objectives of the EU Green Week. Co-UDlabs is joining on the challenge to empower and support these institutions as they untap all their potential for drainage and water infrastructure’s greener, cleaner, and more sustainable future.