Urban Reverb: Empowering Cities – Net-Zero Energy Solutions in Action

Anthony: Hello, and welcome to Urban Reverb, the official podcast of the Smart Cities Marketplace, a European initiative financed by the European Commission. I'm Anthony Colclough.

Just like the devout of other faiths, those who walk the Camino, or travel to Lough Derg, Mecca and Bodh Gaya, those who are devoted to the future of Europe's cities have their own pilgrimage sites: The Smart Cities World Expo in Barcelona, the World Urban Forum, and of course the EU Sustainable Energy Week, where we recorded this episode between the liturgies of panels, keynotes and debates, and the sacraments of coffee and sandwiches.

But will the faith of these urban acolytes be rewarded in the hereafter? Will Europe move en masse from the genesis of best practices to the great book of replication? At this event, I'll catch up a project coordinator for the Smart Cities Marketplace, that's Tatiana.

Tatiana: My name is Tatiana Pascual Garcia. My position at the Flemish Institute for Technological Research is Business Developer, Project Coordinator. And I have been working in the Smart Cities Marketplace project for the last six years. And right now I'm acting as the project coordinator. My background it's in, in law and environmental sciences. And I really enjoy this topic, so I'm excited.

Anthony: An entrepreneur working with cities to enhance local transport, that's Johan.

Johan: So, I'm Johan Haveland. I'm the CEO of the company Asistobe, which is an AI company to optimize public transport. So, my background is 15 years of evaluating data in public transport. And I also used to be director of passenger transportation in the city of Bergen.

Anthony: And a sustainability advisor from a non-profit housing corporation working with Amsterdam to improve the sustainability of social housing. That's Hessel.

Hessel: Yeah, I'm Hessel van der Hoorn. I work at Eigen Haard as a Consultant on Sustainability for homeowners associations. And I'm Program Manager, Sustainability, and I was starting six years ago as a trainee at Eigen Haard. Now I'm grown up to a real function. I made this function and this project. So I say to some people, it's my child.

Anthony: Tatiana is here to help people engage with the Smart Cities Marketplace, and explain what opportunities it can offer to cities and businesses, and to provide a platform for discussion that can showcase Johan and Hessel's achievements.

Tatiana: We do a lot of knowledge sharing and best practices sharing because sometimes the capacity or the knowledge of these projects or technologies are not at the city administration or the businesses themselves don't know whether certain cities have these needs, several cities and of all sizes all over Europe. In this iteration of the Marketplace, we also offer technical assistance. And so we have dedicated teams to support cities or a city-led consortia or businesses as well, now that's something that we're opening, that want to prepare a project proposal to seek private financing. So we can also provide up to between 10 to 30 days of technical assistance, which is really nice.

We also provide access to investment opportunities. So we have a large network of investors that are actively looking for projects. And when it comes to business, we offer the opportunity to showcase the innovative solutions that they can provide, like in the cases of Bergen in and Amsterdam.

Anthony: For Johan, the Smart Cities Marketplace is a forum to engage with cities on how they can solve their local traffic woes. Before we spoke, he made a casual remark that serves as a stark reminder of the geopolitical situation that makes sustainability and energy sovereignty such an important part of European policy today.

Johan: So I'm really uncertain, so we're gonna have a national test of, you have some kind of alarm when there's a war. A siren, yeah. Today we're gonna, at 12, we're gonna test a siren through mobile phones in Norway.

Anthony: Johan is an innovator who wants to modernize the way that cities understand and cope with people’s movements throughout the day.

Johan: So the first part is to understand how people move. Kind of the basis, kind of, I normally say this, if you don't know the demand, how can you optimize supply? And this is true for any business. This is my seventh startup. I'm an old man. I guess your listeners can't see that I'm an old man. And that's not just how you move in a weekday or rush hour. It's kind of, in Birmingham we looked at Aston Villa's home games. It's kind of, how do people move during football games or events or rock concerts because everything matters. So that is the first step.

And then we can predict patterns. We look at the number of football games, or number of rush hours, so we can predict: This is how people really move. And then we put the public transport network on top of that so that we can scan the network for inefficiencies. And then we have algorithms to optimize the public transport. 

So you might add something, you might shorten something. The end goal is it's not to reduce the amount of money you spend on public transport, but kind of spend it better.

The main source of data is mobile network data. That’s basically how your phone is connected to towers. Anonymized, randomized and aggregated. So that there's no way to kind of do the math backwards to identify any individuals. 

We do this do this many places. So we've done this in in Debrecen in Hungary. We do this in the UK.

If you want to optimize public transport, the biggest issue is that cities don't know how people move. So, kind of, there's been an old school way of doing this. So kind of every, and I’m not saying every city in the world, but that's probably 99%, base their understanding of movement on surveys.

They interview people, they ask you how do you move, and you get a snapshot in time. So kind of, this is what I want to change. This is what we did, and I saw the flaws in this kind of system. So I left my job as Director of Passenger Transportation and I founded Asistobe to be to be data driven insights on how people move.

In Debrecen, the public transport data was not as sophisticated, but working with Magyar Telekom, which is a national telecom company in Hungary, their data is excellent. So I can actually get better data in Hungary than in Norway. So we can say that this percentage is walking and this percentage is riding a bike. 

I normally get complaints because my answers are too long. 

Anthony: I thought that was just the right length, and thankfully no sirens went off in the middle of it.

Hessel, who works for a housing corporation in Amsterdam, is engaging with the Smart Cities Marketplace to demonstrate how 20th century ways of working can be updated to ensure that 20th century apartments can have 21st century levels of comfort and sustainability.

Hessel: Beginning in 2017, it was like a maintenance problem. So the windows were really bad, it was raining inside of the house, so we needed to do something about it. And the home owners association didn't have any money to do the maintenance. In Holland, you have a loan for sustainability. And that was the first step: To make the whole building sustainable.

It was a pilot renovation for homeowner associations because homeowner associations in, in Holland, in Netherlands, are only for maintenance.

And this was the first one to improve the building to make it sustainable. Technically, it was not really, really hard. But who wants to make a decision, that was the hardest thing.

Tatiana: We aim to cities working and cities and businesses working together in more innovative and efficient solutions so that can create more sustainable urban environments. 

A lot of these initiatives have happened sometimes through horizon projects that have been co-funded because they have the money to allocate to this. What still takes a while, and it's not so evident, is the scaling up of these initiatives and the replication of these initiatives in other parts of the same city or the country.

It's happening, I think, at the very small level. But not yet. And the same with the case of Bergen in transport. I think the fact that this company had implemented this in Bergen, and I think in Hungary as well, and a couple of other cities, it's really interesting.

But again, a lot of transport initiatives have been implemented in different places. But transport as well is also one of the low hanging fruits, let's say. You can do a lot of things with small actions, but it also takes political will, engaging with the local authorities, and engaging with the people as well. 

Johan: We have proven the advantages are great of using this tool. I think the main problem with public sector is that it's conservative. So there's tons of money being invested on consultants to do these interviews and use other consultants to make models based on these interviews, and then it's hard to switch to a data driven model. So I did a World Bank project in Bucharest in Romania a couple of years ago. We spent €2 million on interviewing people and to make a transport model, which was still just a snapshot in time.

So even though there's a lot of money being spent, it's been really, really hard to get cities to change behavior to be data driven. They know their inefficiencies, and we can demonstrate where they are, and even suggest how they should change. So we try to convince them, but it's much harder than I thought. 

Tatiana: I would say that first of all, it starts with communication, clear communication. Because once you know, you know what you want to do or you sort of have an idea of what you want to do, then you can have set up clear objectives as well on how to do it. So, which would be another thing to attract the private sector.

As a private investor or a business, I would not go engage into a partnership with a local authority when I don't know what they're looking for because it's a high risk for me. So it comes with setting clear communication, capacity building to set also clear objectives and clear plans.

In the case of Amsterdam there's a huge need of renovation of the building stock in the EU. Europe, it's old and we need to renovate it and we need to renovate it fast. Not only to reduce carbon emissions, but also to provide a dignified living environment for your citizens. Right? But you see that you see a lot of challenges when you start implementing this on the ground. From the case of Amsterdam, if I remember correctly, this was done mostly for public housing. But also they have they had some private owners within the public housing. 

When you have more stakeholders to deal with, then it becomes more complicated because there's different interests. Perhaps the owners don't live there, they don't have more incentive to renovate because they're renting. And so on.

Hessel: The difficult of this project was the stakeholders you have you've got a lot of stakeholders. So we have the Home Owners Association Board. You have a community. We have a big shareholder, IHeart. We have got a loan provider.

We've got the local government, the big government. And all the stakeholders have some frameworks you have to deal with. And to fit the plan in all that kind of rules, that makes it difficult. And the decision makers, who's in the lead.

That was the hardest thing to get a good timeline and a good process for which stakeholder wants to make a decision, when.

It was like a spider in a web. That was also really difficult because tenants and private owners have some different communication. Because private owners are in an annual meeting to make decisions and tenants just communicate with IHeart, the social house corporation.

We need to take the lead. We are in a big organization. And a lot of people are thinking: Yeah, I don't want to do it. But if you let them let them thinking with your plan, what's your beginning of the plan and why do you take that decision, then people understand why we want to renovate or make your building sustainable. And it's going to be tenants or some private owners. 

So I put them together at some points, tenants and the private owners, and let them talk together for why do we do that? Why do we do that this? And also to let them make a plan so that the tenants know what the private owners want and the private owners know what the tenants want.

And we had a board of the homeowner association who are really active. So they went from door to door to talk with everybody so that everybody knows what the plan was. We have to translate it to people, because you have 935 homes, 235 private owners. The translation of all the frameworks to make it easy and explainable to everybody that was... Yeah, it was hard. 

Every homeowner association is difficult, but the first time you make a lot of mistakes and that mistake you want to release, that you’re not going to make the mistakes a second, third, four time.

And that was really hard to, To get the communication on the same level. So the private owners knows a lot of more than the tenants. And you want to know why, what is the difference between a tenant and a private owner? I think the tenants want to be in a good house, never more. Good house, not big problems, low energy level, low cost.

But if it's an own house, they cared more of the apartments. So some apartments who are private owners are a little bit better and some tenants are a little bit lower. But you have to deal with each other.

Anthony: But when it comes to the public and private sector, dealing with each other isn't always easy. As Johan explains with the example of mobility, new ideas and opportunities from the private sector are always bubbling up, but cities often lack the resources to grab at them, both in terms of budget and personnel.

Johan: If you just remove a couple of percent of the cars, the city's efficiency will improve. And then there's all these new enterprises moving into cities.

Shared mobility, kind of obviously from e-scooters and city bikes, but also now kind of small shuttles on demand. Public transport is changing. It's a lot of private investment going into actually mobility. So it's a lot of interesting in investment cases for private sector.

Obviously now there's a lot of pressure on public budgets. How do you make this giant chessboard with millions of passengers and thousands of buses, how do you make it work? 

Tatiana: I would say that first of all, it starts with communication, clear communication. But sometimes it's very easy to say be transparent on communication, be clear on what you want to do.

Once you have that, you can attract more people to work with you and work on long-term partnerships, whether it's through a public private partnership, whether it's through a city contract, whatever the instrument would be. It's important as well to have a long-term commitment, because if you're investing above a couple of million, five million, so you don't want to just lose it when the next election comes, right?

But that's also part of having these clear objectives, clear plans for the future. And within this, having a clear regulatory environment within the city administration as well. Because sometimes their own rules don't allow them to, to implement these things. So, it's all connected, and I think all connects with clear communications and capacity building.

Get some information. We have lots of information in our website about this to sort of inspire local authorities and see the best way to implement them. And with clear plans, clear metrics, and also a feedback loop in which you have regular evaluation of how your plans go, it would provide the private sector with a stable investment environment for this.

Some things might work, some things might not, but that's part of the capacity building process as well, internally at the local level and also the private level because sometimes businesses or investors lack this knowledge on how smaller or medium-sized municipalities could work on this, and if they don't engage with them in this process of capacity building, they also lose opportunities for investment. Because if you aggregate several smaller cities, one next to the other on the same region, you can end up with a very nice portfolio for investment and that it's profitable for both parties.

Anthony: To face the enormous task of making our cities sustainable, you need dedicated individuals who are inspired to make change. I asked Johan and Hessel what it was that inspired them on their missions.

Johan: I think that that's probably going back to university, and that's a long time ago. So kind of studying math and queuing theory, understanding the power of statistics and kind of, so I had a great professor at the university their called, their name is Gabriel Halan, kind of who's a kind of statistical master in, in Norway. And just understanding what you can do with math and statistics.

So it is a bit odd. It's not to do with the industry, but that's kind of inspirational. It's always been, I've been in a number of startups and there's always been this: How can use data? I'm really a data driven person.

Hessel: It is really my inspiration to help people with the low income, because social a housing corporations is for people that everybody can afford a house, a good house in a good neighborhood. And then yeah people also need to have a low energy bill.

And this was the beginning. It was our biggest project. It's finished. Really finished, finished. So the phase is done and I hope that we're gonna do it in 80 other homeowners associations. 

Anthony: For Tatiana, faith in the work of initiatives like the Smart Cities Marketplace comes from the change that we are seeing, slowly but steadily across Europe's cities.

Tatiana: So you know that the Smart Cities Marketplace, we have a presence in very big events all over Europe. Every year, we go to the Smart Cities World Expo in Barcelona. And I've been going to the Expo for the last seven years now, even before the project started.

You tend to notice, changes in the city as well, like, I was there and I noticed that my hotel there were lots of bike lanes which before Covid were not there. And I was really surprised by the amount of people biking in Barcelona, which is not a flat city. It's quite hilly and it's big. So I started talking to a cab driver and it's like, when did this happen?

‘Oh yeah, just right after the pandemic, the city is moving into more sustainable things.’ Of course, the cab driver was, had a different opinion. ‘Oh, they, they don't know how to ride.’ So, ‘always crossing where they…’ Fine that happens. I notice a lot of more electric parking spaces, electric charging points, smart lampposts. Things that, perhaps if you're walking around you, you don't notice. Also, like more nature-based solutions as well. Like vertical gardens in the buildings. Really nice old buildings that have been renovated, that look from the outside.

So that's something that working in this topic for several years now we're all together working towards the same goal and also seeing it passing. Seeing it happen in a city itself. 

Anthony: And that's your cue to join the Smart Cities Marketplace at the Smart Cities World Expo in Barcelona this 5-7 November, or look out for updates on the website if you can't make it: smart-cities-marketplace.ec.europa.eu.

There again you'll see the legions of devotees pushing forward toward the city of the future, its brilliance like a precious jewel, clear as crystal, one that does not need even the sun or the moon, so brightly does it shine. Join me next time for the season finale of Urban Reverb, the official podcast of the Smart Cities Marketplace, a European initiative financed by the European Commission. Thanks for listening.