What is the Smart City Guidance Package?
The SCGP explains how to develop and apply an integrated approach in planning and implementation of smart city projects. It explains the different stages in developing a coherent roadmap and the to do’s at each stage. Besides, it gives examples and discusses key success factors and common pitfalls for the introduction of smart city solutions. What is more, the guide explores various accelerating actions that that can help to achieve more impact locally through replication and scaling up in cities.
It is intended as a self-help guide that wants to inform and inspire by sharing experiences and best practices of other cities, thus paving the way for smooth implementation of smart city projects. The SCGP does not discuss technological solutions, but the preconditions and processes that need to be organised for a successful planning and implementation, deploying a holistic perspective.
How has it been developed?
To better facilitate sharing of knowledge and experiences between the cities participating in the EIP-SCC Action Cluster IPPR, it was decided to bundle best practices in the form of a “cookbook”. With the aim of gathering information for this “cookbook”, the EIP-SCC Action Cluster IPPR organised several workshops in 2016 and 2017 involving commitments and other public authorities. Topics explored during these workshops were phases of implementation, key stakeholders and their roles, common pitfalls and barriers during planning and implementation, innovative solutions and best practices, the role of standards, and how to ensure replication and upscaling. Based on the outcomes of these workshops, preliminary content for the SCGP was further developed through interviews of city representatives, projects managers and researchers and desk research of FP7 and H2020 smart city projects, in particular of SCC01 lighthouse projects.
Besides, through ERANET and JPI Urban Europe, 17 additional medium-sized Smart Cities were engaged, and have provided the findings on REPLICATE & SCALE UP. The AC IPPR initiative “KPI’s and tools for decision making and benchmarking”, led by Bernard Gindroz (European Energy Award-eea-, CEN/CENELEC), has bundled experiences and best practices in the field of roadmap development, monitoring and standardization, in particular on the methods used by eea. The findings were discussed with lighthouse and fellow cities, ICLEI and Eurocities city networks, and SCC-01 project managers, and enriched with their feedback. Eventually, all these inputs were combined in this novel methodology for developing a coherent roadmap for integrated planning and implementation of smart city projects that is at the heart of this guidebook.