From the 2nd to the 4th March, Fondazione Politecnico di Milano held two important technical meetings in the early stages of our H2020 Smart Cities and Communities Programme, “Sharing Cities”. During three days, all the relevant partners, responsible for the demonstration of tangible technology measures (in our ‘Place’ work package) and for their integration in the urban platform, got together for an intensive and fruitful working session.

The goal of the meeting was to join the global and local teams from our cities, to test the governance model of WP3 (Lisboa E-Nova, Comune di Milano, GLA, CEiiA and UrbanDNA), which will be critical for the successful implementation of the smarter and innovative measures in our cities. In Milan we presented the status and next steps of the building retrofit and local and low carbon energy generation activities; sustainable energy management systems, sustainable e-Mobility measures and the development of a smart lamppost cluster. The successful deployment of these measures is a big challenge within the Sharing Cities Programme. These are the activities that have the biggest “slice” of budget committed to them in terms of what is agreed with the European Commission.  They also have significant potential for exploitation and replication across our fellow Sharing Cities and wider circle of scale-up cities, creating new business models and creating value in our cities. The planning and commitment of all partners is, at this stage, very important and decisive for the delivery of the 10 audacious and distinctive goals of the Sharing Cities Programme.

The discussion around our “digital first” approach was possible through designing the first use cases on and across the physical measures to allow the integration and feasibility of the urban platform.

What do we have to deliver in our cities?

• Buildings and renewable energy: deep-retrofit measures to public and private residential properties affecting 15,000 citizens across the six cities and integrating the properties with low carbon energy sources (solar PV, water source heat pump) and electric vehicle charging, all wrapped together by  a digital first digitally driven sustainable energy management systems;
• Put in place a sustainable energy management system (SEMS) that integrates and optimises energy (e.g. demand and supply) from all sources in the districts (interfacing with city wide systems). Provide a means that supports citizens in being incentivised to get informed and understand their energy consumption with the aim of becoming more efficient with their use and reduce their bills. This system collates all project data and carries out analytics, pushing to urban sharing platform;
• To implement novel means of supporting the shift from high to low carbon mobility, through implementing a number of shared e-Mobility “infrastructures and services” and embracing the shared mobility-as-a-service approach, with 10% of people deciding to shift to electric vehicles achieving an annual reduction of 1125 tonnes CO2, with sufficient visibility and evidence to support a shift in pace and uptake.
• Smarter 1000 city lampposts while upgrading to LED, to gain the RoI benefits (of energy and operational savings) and in parallel, multi-purpose these assets to enable delivery of smart city services. Scale up to metropolitan areas bringing attractive funds/loan terms to expand volumes from H2020 commitments to broader, bolder levels (Alignment with EIP_SCC).

The next 100 days will see the buildings section in our Lighthouse cities, and the testing of the Patti Chiari model in Milano, a truly participatory process that aggregated demand for and enabled scale-up of private building deep energy retrofit. Together with the EIP_SCC Initiative we will develop an initial outline common needs specification; capturing and addressing key challenges to overcome, through the smart lamppost.  We will also design district mobility measures and start the procurement processes for the acquisition of new e-Mobility services.  We will also integrate everything through the design of smart use cases that will be a reference for our common urban platform.