The “TURaS” project aims to bring together urban communities, researchers, local authorities and SMEs to research, develop, demonstrate and disseminate transition strategies and scenarios to enable European cities and their rural interfaces to build vitally-needed resilience in the face of significant sustainability challenges. To ensure maximum impact, the TURaS project has developed an innovative twinning approach bringing together decision makers in local authorities with SMEs and academics to ensure meaningful results and real change are implemented over the duration of the project. 11 local authorities or local development agencies are involved as partners in the project and they will orient research and development from the outset towards the priority sustainability and resilience challenges facing their cities. 9 leading academic research institutions and 6 SMEs will work with these cities helping them to reduce their urban ecological footprint through proposing new visions, feasiblity strategies, spatial scenarios and guidance tools to help cities address these challenges. The specific challenges addressed in TURaS include: climate change adaptation and mitigation; natural resource shortage and unprecedented urban growth.Over the five year duration of the project, the feasibility of these new approaches will be tested in selected case study neighbourhoods and new measures to enable adaptive governance, collaborative decision-making, and behavioural change towards resilient and sustainable European cities will be tested. The impact of these new approaches will be measured and results compared between participating cities before a final set of strategies and tools will be developed for demonstration, dissemination and exploitation in other European cities. SMEs are highly involved in all work packages of the project and specific measures have been put in place to ensure the optimal economic impact of the project is achieved.