Integrated Planning, Policy and Regulations

Integrated Planning, Policy and Regulation focuses on Innovative forms of smart city policies and regulations that are needed to enable large scale implementation and roll-out of smart cities. Cities need an adequate set of framework conditions in the field of policy and regulations in order to be able to smarten up. New governance concepts are required to coordinate and integrate smart city stakeholders – cities, businesses, and research organisations – within the change process so to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Stakeholders need to jointly experience and learn with new forms of governance and policy concepts to further the process of becoming a sustainable, smart city.

This connects with the need of 'Integrated Planning and Management'. Integrated planning and management involves spatial, temporal and technical coordination of diverse policy areas and planning resources to achieve defined goals using specified (financial) instruments. Its success requires the comprehensive and early involvement of all governmental and non-governmental players, private sector, and citizens. It is particularly challenging as it involves managing long-term planning perspectives and short term actions, addressing domains as diverse as transport, energy, ICT and beyond – in both existing (retrofit) and new urban territory. Our current approaches are insufficiently agile to cope with a more entrepreneurial approach and to respond to the pace of change in demography, societal expectations, and technology. This requires technical planning capabilities, more inclusive participatory and consultation processes, and greater collaboration within and across traditional policy and administrative boundaries within and between cities and communities.

The Action Cluster works together with European cities, businesses, research institutes and academia to build together Smart and Sustainable Cities. To sum up, our effort goes towards the implementation and design of smart cities strategies by making best use of capacity, monitoring and measuring tools and by enabling knowledge sharing and replication of successful cases.

The Six fields in which we operate

• Policy/Strategy/Plans
• Governance/Organisation
• Programmes/Funding
• Market Engagement
• Enabling
• Monitoring

…and more to come, such as standards strategies, maximising the effectiveness of City Networks, capacity and International strategies (e.g. China, US, India), among others.

Latest News

Recently, the Action Cluster focused on an ambitious project led by NTNU on integrated planning for smart city solutions. The Smart City Guidance Package serves as manual of best practices, real cases, examples on implementation and replication of Smart City Projects to be consulted by every potential Smart City word-wide. It includes common pitfalls and solutions during the implementation of smart cities projects and defines a set of KPIs to ensure optimisation of city programmes, planning, implementation and management. The guide was presented at various past events such as the Nordic Edge Expo 2017, the Oslo Urban Arena and the May 2019 General Assembly.

The last version of the SCGP was launched on 8th May 2019 in Brussels.
Download the Smart Cities Guidance Package (available under Creative Commons License as explained on page 1 of the guide)

Achievements to date:

• Final version of the SCGP
• Agreement on 5 themes and 4 main KPIs categories

Next Steps

The next steps include:

• SCGP Summary translated in EU languages
• Upscaling from testbeds to adoption
• Transportation of the SCGP to an online Wiki tool

Contacts:

Get in contact with the Integrated Planning Action Cluster at integratedplanning@eu-smartcities.eu.