Urban Reverb: The Family

ANTHONY COLCLOUGH: 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. The great musician T-Rex once sang the following rhetorical pronouncement: ‘What’s it like to be alone? I liken it to a balloon.’ When we act outside a wider ecosystem sharing our goal, we are doomed to abandon terrestrial achievement.

The other T-Rex, the king of the dinosaurs, who was unable to rally his species in time to avert extinction, would doubtless agree. But, unlike the lizard monarchs that ruled the globe before the debut of humankind, the European Commission is taking a consensus-led and multi-pronged approach to fighting our existential crisis, that of climate change.

The Smart Cities Marketplace is just one of a host of enormous initiatives working to achieve sustainability across Europe and the world, not alone, but together. Today, we meet some of the people behind those initiatives and discover how the pieces of the puzzle fit. 

FREDERIC BOYER: My name is Frederic Boyer. I work for a network of cities called Energy Cities, and I am coordinating the Covenant of Mayors office for Europe since 2015. The Covenant of Mayors is one of the most successful EU initiatives. It's an alliance between the European Commission and local authorities, and cities.

VERONICA CERNA: My name is Veronica Cerna. I'm from 20 Twenty Communications and I'm here to talk about Scalable Cities. The main goal of Scalable Cities is to look at everything that has been done within the projects of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, point out the best solutions and support them in Scaling up within the cities, replicating them across Europe through collaboration.

THOMAS OSDOBA: My name is Thomas Osdoba. I'm the programme director of Net Zero Cities, which was selected by the European Commission to serve as the platform to help 100 cities become climate neutral and smart by 2030. So, without a doubt, this Mission for Climate Neutral and Smart Cities is the most ambitious and most comprehensive approach anywhere in the world to help cities take climate action with such an ambitious and quite radical effort.

ANTHONY COLCLOUGH: Net Zero Cities, Scalable Cities, the Covenant of Mayors and the Smart Cities Marketplace. So far, one commonality should be evident - all of these initiatives work with cities. And another one: They all work towards achieving environmental sustainability. So, why four initiatives and not only one? Like the Four Musketeers (yes, there were originally four of them), each initiative has its own approach.

FREDERIC BOYER: The Covenant of Mayors unites over 11, 000 municipalities across Europe. We have very large capital cities, but we also have small towns and all of them are pledging to go beyond the EU, the European climate and energy objectives. And this alliance is delivering alongside a huge legislative process on the transition of Europe to climate neutrality. Without the cities, without the mayors, there is no green deal. There is no climate neutrality of Europe. Most of the emissions are coming from the cities, but the solutions are coming from cities.

The Covenant of Mayors is another way of implementing EU policies. The cities are requested to go beyond the EU energy and climate objectives. So as soon as Europe is increasing the target, we are asking cities to voluntarily commit to go beyond. Signatories of the Covenant of Mayors are voluntarily committing to decarbonize their territory. They are mitigating climate change by renovating their building stock, changing their transport system, by deploying renewable energy sources. Not only they are mitigating climate change, but they are also working on adapting their territories to the effects of climate change. Finally, a pillar of the Covenant of Mayors is alleviating energy poverty. Obviously, with the recent energy crisis, we saw many people having difficulty to pay their bills, and local authorities are trying to find a way to reduce this energy bill. 

VERONICA CERNA: Scalable Cities started as a bottom-up approach. Seven projects have started with collaboration and only after that, an overall more official governance structure was introduced. They have about 550 different demonstrations of various innovations both technological and social innovations, from mobility to urban data, ICT infrastructure, but also citizen engagement and overall urban governance. We are here to support them with activities and action groups to help them with grants and to support the cities in their further replication of these solutions.

Some of the projects, for example, they were investing or, they were installing heat pumps. Some of them were refurbishing and renovating buildings several buildings in the district. Some of them, were installing, mobility stations and self-driving buses and testing them, how that would work and how that would improve the lives of their citizens. It is essentially for citizens.

Usually, there are two or three key pilot cities. We call them the Lighthouse Cities. And then there are between three to six other cities that are within the project following what is being done in the pilot.

So, when we talk about, replication, we talk about piloting this solution, testing it from every aspect within the project, in the pilot city, and then, working with experts, with different types of financing, with everything relevant and needed to implement that specific solution in different conditions in a different city, under their specific conditions.

In the end, when we prove that the concept is implementable, that it works in the pilot city, that it can be implemented in a fellow city, and that is also a further learning experience, then after that, we can take it as a, as a case study, as a good practice and implement it elsewhere.

Our job through the mission platform as Net Zero Cities is to be able to help those cities through several key elements of their work, from developing local commitments, building a mandate for very aggressive action, identifying new policies to overcome barriers or accelerate the pace of action, and identifying needs for capital and finance to help them implement their projects.

Our job is to work with them in every aspect of this work and, in the simplest terms possible, do whatever it takes to try to learn how to achieve this outcome by 2030. We have 112 cities working on this ambition, and our goal is to help as many as possible find their way to climate neutrality as quickly as we can.

A number of people rightly suggest that in some cases that may not be technically possible to do in the time that we have. It's one of those things where, like, the moonshot, which inspired the whole concept of missions in this context, nobody knew for sure at the beginning if they were going to actually make it and be successful. And so, we're trying to hold on to that spirit of we're not 100% sure. I'm pretty confident some cities are going to make it by 2030. Our job is to learn as much as possible as fast as we can so that three years from now, we can have this conversation and answer that question in a much more precise fashion. I think the other thing that's worth noting is the mission exists, not for these 112 cities, but rather for all of Europe, because of climate action, the need for climate action doesn't get solved by 100 cities or 112 cities. It gets solved by all cities and it gets solved by all cities globally. 

ANTHONY COLCLOUGH: The Covenant of Mayors works with thousands and thousands of cities to set ambitious climate targets that allow them to be frontrunners and vectors of change for all of Europe and beyond. I can add that it also provides knowledge and expertise that can help them measure and achieve those goals. Net Zero Cities is like the tip of the arrow, taking just 112 cities in a kind of hot house, or maybe we should say ‘cool house,’ to achieve even more extreme targets in an even shorter timeline, as part of the EU’s Mission for 100 Climate Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030. Scalable Cities works with local governments to test ways of achieving this, experimenting with innovative approaches, grabbing the ones that work well and widening their impact.

For each of these Initiatives, the Smart Cities Marketplace plays its own complementary role.

THOMAS OSDOBA: Governments across Europe, including the Commission, have created many initiatives and many programs to provide support and help to cities, whether in the form of direct funding for innovative projects, to support the development of a whole ecosystem of solution providers, service providers and experts who can help cities with their work.

One of those is the Smart Cities Marketplace, which is envisioned to bring together practitioners and service providers who have specific expertise to help cities with the various aspects of their work, whether it's improving building data use for improving building energy performance, to better monitoring transportation needs and mobility, to understanding waste and behaviour aspects of their work. Our job as part of the Mission and Net Zero Cities is to help cities create the conditions in which those services are both in demand and useful.

The simplest way to think about the value of something like the Smart Cities Marketplace is that you've got a number of businesses, service providers and solution providers who've already developed the services and the offerings that they have and are prepared to meet cities when cities are ready to ask for their help or to buy their services. In many ways, it becomes a point of focus so cities can look at what services are out there and understand what it is that they could use to help them with their work. And cities often aren't the ones who are best capable of knowing what's available in the marketplace. So, in many ways, it makes it easier for the cities to look at what's out there, understand what's possible, and then develop strategies to procure if procurement is the way to do this or to help businesses and others within their city to make those services work for them.

There's a real synergistic aspect to this relationship. I just spoke with the Smart Cities Marketplace folks, only a few weeks ago about how the Net Zero Cities platform will help the marketplace understand what services are going to be required for cities to achieve climate neutrality.

FREDERIC BOYER: The Smart Cities Marketplace complements activities that our initiative cannot offer. We are trying to organise capacity building activities, but we're talking, as I said before, 11, 000 municipalities from different sizes with different languages, and we cannot enter into a kind of technical assistance for cities to implement the action plan.

And this is where all the initiatives are very important, financed by the EU to complement our action. Smart Cities Marketplace is going even further, providing technical assistance, making the matchmaking between local authorities’ action and investors and companies who want to work and implement actions on the decarbonization of the building stock or on transport and so on.

We give a signal to the market. We say, look, there are plenty of cities that are ready to go for electric buses. So, we need to develop those buses somewhere in Europe, or hopefully in Europe, then the same for renewable energy and so on. And I see it also from the request we have from the private sector directly to the covenant asking us for contacts.

They really value what the political commitment of mayors to go to climate neutrality means, but also the action plan that we have behind. Because again, the Covenant is not only a political commitment, it's an action plan and this means projects. This means investment. This means a lot of potential for businesses.

VERONICA CERNA: The Smart Cities Marketplace started a bit earlier as an initiative that was a bit more top-down. Whereas the Scalable Cities, as I have mentioned, is a bottom-up initiative. The two initiatives are at this point, very similar in who they are targeting and the problems that they are trying to solve.

The private sector is always important because they are the implementer of the innovation and they are then also looking at how that can be implemented in other areas. We know that the cities face a lot of issues and that there is a lot of learning on the city side, so we try to provide them with the structure that can help them with this. We provide them with the knowledge. We provide them with state-of-the-art information that is stemming from the pilot.

When it comes to working with the investors, this is where we try to help a lot more. What we have found out the cities and the investors speak a completely different language. Even though they are trying to approach each other, there needs to be quite a lot of guidance when it comes to understand what kind of information is relevant for the investors. And then also for the investors to understand these types of projects and how the ROI [return on investment] is a bit different than when it comes to their standard, types of, investment.

​THOMAS OSDOBA: There are several, quite pioneering European companies that have developed, performance management dashboards that help cities actively manage multiple aspects of their climate programmes with a very high-quality visualization interface. And it just improves the quality of city staff and their stakeholders' understanding of what's happening. Our job is to help the cities be better at their work, which then leads to commercial opportunities. Right?

So, by helping these cities develop a deeper appreciation of what they need to do over a very aggressive programme, they're better able to look out and say, ‘We need this tool. We need this kind of support.’ So, we're seeing several instances of that. In one case, competitors who offer similar services are working together to share information amongst themselves about what are they learning about what cities need. 

Many of these service providers now are looking at how much cities are going to have to invest, not just public investment, but private investment in improving building performance, and they're starting to provide estimates of just how much investment is going to be needed in each city and now a lot of these companies can go to investors and say, ‘We are now positioned for growth in a way that we couldn't show you before.’ And so they're now able to access investment resources that allow them to grow.

Because one of the things that you often find, especially with newer companies that have very innovative solutions is they could be the best thing that we've ever seen in a particular market, but they don't have the cash to grow if the market grows. And all of a sudden you get stuck in this Valley of Death and these and these little companies are unable to grow fast enough to capture that demand. And so, in some cases, we're seeing companies be able to go to investors much earlier than they otherwise would to get that sort of support and be prepared for growth.

ANTHONY COLCLOUGH: And there you have it. Just as each of these initiatives cannot achieve its goals alone, neither can cities. They need the collaboration of other actors, including private industry. While cities are engaged in such collaborations with all kinds of organisations, the worlds of the public and private sectors need someone to provide a bridge that makes the distance between them simpler and faster to traverse. The Smart Cities Marketplace is one such bridge that can close the gap between ambition and achievement.

FREDERIC BOYER: One of the first big advantages I see in the development of those different initiatives is that it's the attention and recognition that the EU decision makers are giving to cities. And the innovation potential of local authorities, not only as city administration, but because they are the ones who can engage citizens, SMEs, and innovate or deploy, because it's not only a question of innovation, it's also a question of deploying what is already existing. So that's the value of those initiatives. Once again, this alliance between the Commission and the local authorities at a political level, but then also at a technical level.

ANTHONY COLCLOUGH: If this all sounds a little abstract, we have to remember that this engagement is happening on the ground in cities all over Europe. Here’s Frederic sending us out with just one example.

FREDERIC BOYER: In the city of Leuven in Flanders some years ago, they put in place what they call Leuven 2030. So, the city gave the coordination, the management and the steering of the climate neutrality journey. They gave it to a structure they call the quadruple helix, where you have representative of the city, so the mayor is sitting in the board; representative of citizens; representative of the businesses; and representative of the academia. And all together they define a strategy. They define an action plan. They are attracting funding. And honestly, if you go to Leuven, you would see that the city has changed in the last years drastically.

ANTHONY COLCLOUGH: Archaeologists have yet to discover what kind of initiatives, if any, the dinosaurs put in place to forestall their impending extinction. From what I’ve heard today, I have the feeling that our approach may stand a better chance. To find a full transcript of this episode, learn more or join the action, check out https://smart-cities-marketplace.ec.europa.eu/ .  The Smart Cities Marketplace and this podcast are an initiative of the European Commission made possible through European funding. Thanks for listening.