Creating the aRTes Consortium to apply to DUT 2023 Call is an idea of the siblings Jacobo and Alicia Bautista. They run in Madrid, Spain, a SMB, Vive Tu Azotea Inicio - VIVE Tu AZOTEA  (Live Your Rooftop) which goal is to bring the unused urban rooftop space to the neighbours.

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Jacobo, physicist and technology consultant (52), and Alicia, architect (49), discovered the EU DUT program – Driving Urban Transitions, in 2022 and created the basic structure of the DUT Call proposal joining their skills generating different innovations at urbanism, construction, software, sustainability, urban farming and even drone levels, which reflected or aimed to solve the difficulties, concerns and opportunities they faced when presenting rooftop projects to a building neighbour community in Spain.

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Then they look for partners in different countries, as DUT promotes the UE countries cooperation (at least 3 countries must be involved).

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As there were several innovations, the number of partners and countries to execute them should be high too.

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The first partner to join them was Ester Higueras, Urbanism full professor in the Architecture School of Madrid at UPM – Polytechnic University of Madrid. Ester, as Alicia´s teacher was their first stop to check if the rooftop consortium had some opportunity and value to apply to DUT call. Ester´s feedback was amazing, and she started to work actively to boost the consortium. Introducing Lorenzo Olivieri, UPM Construction teacher, suggesting Roofscapes partner in France, introducing to R2M and fine tuning the different innovations and presenting a more academic proposal.

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Jacobo´s idea of creating a South Europe or Mediterranean consortium gain force, as it was the natural rooftop region in Europe, for weather reasons, and it meant a powerful and impacting regional project.

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So, they started to look for partners in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus.

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The sustainability architect in Portugal, Livia Tirone, introduced us to the Civil Engineering School in the Aveiro University. Jacobo and Alicia managed to involve Ecómetro and NESI in Spain, R2M and Team Dev in Italy, Infodim in Greece and in Cyprus the University of Cyprus. So, they successfully created aRTes, Active RoofTop Souh Europe.

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Additionally, Jacobo and Alicia obtained in Spain the support for aRTes from the municipalities of Madrid City, and Madrid Autonomous Community, as well as Roofscapes obtained in France the support of Paris City and Paris Region.

Leaded by Jacobo and Alicia, the PreProposal and the FullProposal phases and decks were a full year hard teamwork of all the partners, with special mention of R2M that acted both as consortium partner and as consulting advisor for EU R&D funding projects.

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Now aRTes is being successfully executed in its first of three years, and Jacobo and Alicia have an important project coordination role supporting Ester and UPM, as well as participating in several of the innovations and researches.