mySMARTLife: Transition of EU cities towards a new concept of Smart Life and Economy

mySMARTLife project has defined during the 70 months of its execution an Urban Transformation Strategy to support cities in the definition of transition models, a suitable path to reach a high level of excellence in its development process, addressing the main city challenges and progressing to the smart people and smart economy concepts. These two concepts are considered as the main drivers to accelerate the transition towards sustainability.

The main instrument to achieve this very ambitious strategy is the Advanced Urban Planning, consisting of an integrated approach of the already planned city interventions on the basis of a rigorous impact assessment, an active citizen engagement in the decision-making process and a structured business approach, the city business model.

The foundations of the transformation strategy are the following:

1. Smart people concept. Innovative ways to involve citizens in the development of the transformation, increasing the social acceptance of the technologies by means of a better understanding of the associated benefits;
2. Smart economy concept. In depth analysis of the key factors for the city business model to create an ecosystem for big companies and how to replicate it, what policies and actions are appropriate to promote innovative business models mainly for SMEs and entrepreneurs;
3. Introduce the concept of integrated urban planning from the point of view of the expected impacts (social, economic and environmental) to understand the interaction between interventions and support the decision making process with clear indicators;
4. Large scale validation, addressing the city transformation by means of the implementation of very innovative solutions in the energy and mobility sectors, taking ICTs as main cross-cutting domain. In mySMARTLife, around 150 smart solutions were implemented in the three lighthouse cities, collecting information, engaging citizens, providing an open data ecosystem to foster the development of added value services and strengthening impacts;
5. Strong replication activity, involving lighthouse and followers in an extensive process of transferability of best practices and capacity building actions, strengthening the scaling up and market deployment of the technical solutions and creating new business opportunities to companies bringing competiveness, growth and job creation.

Nantes (France), Hamburg (Germany) and Helsinki (Finland) have acted as lighthouse cities and  Bydgoszcz (Poland), Rijeka (Croatia) and Palencia (Spain) have been the followers.

The validation of the more than 140 technologies implemented in the lighthouse cities has been based on the definition of a rigorous evaluation procedure, based on standard KPIs, and in which the associated impacts have been tested and the results disseminated.

In terms of the final impact achieved, 147,054 m² have been either retrofitted or new built with high-performance standards in the three cities. These interventions provided 107.51 kWh/m2yr of improvement per m² comparing the final and initial situation of the buildings (retrofitting) and the final and reference/normative situation (in the case of new buildings). This represents an outstanding figure of 8,777,593.47 kWh/yr of energy saved. Apart from this, 29% of the final net energy used by the buildings is covered by RES.

In terms of mobility, the final number of electric vehicles deployed due to the direct and promotional activities in mySMARTLife is 4,350 (larger than initially planned). This leads to a total number of driven km of 68,307 km in the 3 cities with clean vehicles, for which total CO₂ emissions saved have been 12,477.09 tCO2/yr.

Finally, it can be highlighted that 15,894 kWp of RES installations have been implemented and 1,437 kWh of electrical storage (batteries) were installed.

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