TC BASAKSEHIR BELEDIYESI

Their core work

Başakşehir Municipality is a large Istanbul district authority that participates in European research projects primarily as a real-world urban testing environment — providing city infrastructure, building stock, local communities, and regulatory context that research consortia need to validate solutions outside the lab. In UNALAB they contributed to urban nature-based solutions by enabling co-design processes with residents and piloting innovative financing for green infrastructure. In METABUILDING LABS they serve as an access point to real urban building stock for testing new envelope materials and joining an open innovation test bed ecosystem. Their practical value to consortia is not research capacity but municipal reach: the ability to open city spaces, involve local populations, and provide the governance context that turns prototypes into deployable urban solutions.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their first H2020 engagement (UNALAB, 2017), the municipality's focus was clearly on soft urban governance: engaging citizens, co-designing green spaces, developing financing models, and applying scenario thinking to long-term urban planning. By 2021 the focus shifted decisively toward hard technology infrastructure — building materials, envelope testing, digital platforms, and open innovation ecosystems oriented at SMEs. This is a meaningful shift: from community process facilitation toward serving as a physical and institutional gateway into Turkish urban building stock for European technology developers.

The municipality is positioning itself as an institutional gateway to Turkish urban infrastructure for European consortia, moving from participatory planning roles toward becoming a node in SME-oriented open innovation networks for construction and materials sectors.

How they like to work

Başakşehir has participated exclusively as a consortium partner — never as coordinator — which is typical for municipal bodies whose value lies in access rather than project management. Despite only two projects, they have accumulated 83 unique consortium partners across 20 countries, indicating they join large, multi-partner Innovation Actions where city authorities serve as demonstration and validation sites. This pattern suggests working with them means gaining access to a real metropolitan context in Turkey, not a research team that will drive the technical agenda.

Despite only two projects, the municipality has connected with 83 distinct partners spanning 20 countries — a network density that reflects the large, pan-European consortia typical of urban innovation and materials test bed projects. Their geographic footprint extends well across Europe, with Turkey as a non-EU associated country bringing additional geographic diversity to consortia.

What sets them apart

As one of the few Turkish municipalities with active H2020 participation, Başakşehir offers something most European city partners cannot: access to Istanbul's scale — a metropolis of 15 million people with dense residential building stock, a large SME base, and a regulatory environment that differs meaningfully from EU norms. For consortia needing to demonstrate that solutions work beyond the EU bubble, a Turkish municipal partner adds both geographic diversity and real-world stress-testing that Western European pilots cannot replicate. Their presence in both a nature-based solutions project and a construction materials test bed signals institutional flexibility across different urban domains.

Highlights from their portfolio

• METABUILDING LABS
  The larger of the two projects by budget (EUR 128,125) and the most technically ambitious, positioning the municipality as part of a pan-European SME-oriented open innovation test bed for building envelope materials — a role that extends well beyond typical city participation in research projects.
• UNALAB
  Represents the municipality's earliest EU research engagement and the clearest example of their urban governance contribution — participatory co-design and innovative financing for nature-based solutions in a major non-EU metropolitan context.