The Policy and Practice Unit (UPP) links the scientific work of CEDEUS with various stakeholders in the community, such as civil society organizations, elementary, secondary and university students (undergraduate and postgraduate), public officials and decisionmakers.

Within the UPP there are two defined spheres of action: 

• Policy. Through Public Policy Documents, the aim is to deliver proposals to decision-makers (legislators and public officials) on public agenda issues related to urban sustainability.
• Practice. It includes two community outreach programmes. The first of these is Active Citizenship, which seeks, through various curricular and educational materials, to link urban sustainability and the centre’s research with students from public schools. The second programme is Urban Labs, a coordination and research platform that discovers opportunities for intervention through collaborative work with local stakeholders in the selected territories.

Finally, the Observatory connects both spheres (policy and practice) by offering a freely accessible urban data repository, a set of urban sustainability indicators (29) and their respective thresholds. The Observatory aims to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, the National Urban Development Policy and, thus, to contribute to the implementation of the New Urban Agenda.

To make these indicators visible, the Observatory team created the CEDEUS Municipal Platform, a tool where you can find 30 sustainability indicators of 71 Chilean municipalities. This can be an instrument to guide the future actions of researchers, government and decision-makers.

Through these programmes, the UPP has become a space for synthesis and coordination between different stakeholders in society and within academia, turning interdisciplinary actions into transdisciplinary ones in specific territories.