Meeting thinking Much Smarter in Eindhoven
Eindhoven 23 May 2016: Battling through a surprisingly stormy day in May, 14 key lighthouse projects came together to share solutions and with the long-term ambition of creating a smarter cities marketplace.
In town for the General Assembly of the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities taking place the next day, the meeting encouraged this smaller group of projects all financially supported by the European Commission over the past five years, to set their sights on finding areas of collaboration in order to successfully replicate their innovations.
Innovatively and intuitively organized by CITYkeys and Smart Cities initiatives and in collaboration with the European Commission and with the support of the City of Eindhoven, the meeting set an agenda of strict topics on which every project was invited to comment.
Opening the meeting Axel Volkery from the unit for Research and Innovative Transport Systems, DG MOVE of the European Commission, said ‘a key objective has to be on long-term investment and making smart cities projects financially viable’. The three areas of focus for the meeting were business models and procurement, replication and ‘enabling’ tools that included key performance indicators and standards.
The lighthouse projects are at differing stages in their development and consequently in their experience and areas of expertise, so it was interesting to see overlaps in action.
Andrew Collinge speaking for Sharing Cities, a project involving Lisbon, London and Milan as its lighthouse cities, said an ambition for his project was to achieve investment from local private investors in London in order to make the project sustainable in the long-term. In its early stages, this was a key focus in order to finance such initiatives as smarter lamp posts.
Sarah Bogaert representing City ZEN, a project encouraging behavioural changes in public consumption such as the use of energy boxes in the home and based in the cities of Amsterdam and Grenoble, said some initially planned business cases did not prove cost efficient when facing reality check, but alternative, workable ones have been found. Yet initiatives included in the project such as a roadshow would help encourage replication and further public awareness.
Guillaume Corradino presented Sinfonia, a five-year initiative to deploy large-scale, integrated and scalable energy solutions in mid-sized European cities. These include the unique cooperation between the cities of Bolzano and Innsbruck to achieve 40-50% in primary energy savings and increase the share of renewables by 20% in two pioneer districts. As part of the project’s replication plan, they are targeting other cities that might be interested in setting up similar projects.
Bart Lathouwer of the ESPRESSO project, whose aim is to analyse potential gaps and standards developed by the various standardisation organizations said ‘working towards open standards is fundamental to create the smart city market place’. ESPRESSO will support projects by publishing guidelines on standards.
Branislav Iglar for The Smart Cities Information System added that through the update of information of projects into http://smartcities-infosystem.eu/, replication would automatically be encouraged. Future projects could learn about the experiences, challenges and the results of other projects through the medium of the website. Projects can upload any tools they have developed onto the website for the opportunity of further replication.
On conclusion of the meeting, Nikolaos Kontinakis from CITYkeys said ‘It was satisfying to see the creativity of the lighthouse projects and their intense desire to collaborate; it is now in our hands to make things happen.’
About the author
Cordelia Wilson is working as a Project Manager at GOPA Com. in Brussels. She is also the Project manager of the Smart Cities Information System (SCIS).