SPACE4Cities will dynamise the uptake of space-based solutions for dynamic use and management of public space. This is an area of smart city development which is currently lagging behind in digital transformation when compared to parallel domains of similar economic and social importance. Cities are at the forefront of fighting todays grand societal challenges, as they consume 75% of the natural resources, 78% of the worlds energy, produce 50% of the global waste, and emit 60-80% of the greenhouse gases. Yet, they account for less than 2% of the Earths surface. Therefore, SPACE4Cities project predominantly targets cities and densely populated regions. Cities face increasing pressure to tackle their climate challenges and to utilise their existing assets more efficiently, while at the same time be more agile in reacting to constant change from climate events and other factors. In effect, cities need to be more dynamic and more resilient. However, currently, cities are not able to manage their public space (on ground and in air) in an agile manner that would adequately support the increasing amount of different types of needs. If the management of areas is to become dynamic, it has to be based on dynamic data assets. This project strives for better, more dynamic management of public spaces, answering a concrete need for cities and regions to be able to adapt to fast-changing requirements for transport infrastructure, open spaces and city maintenance, and to increase their resilience to cope with extreme and disruptive events. Via smart exploitation of space data, the SPACE4Cities project aims to build replicable solutions for the dynamic management of public areas, and a clear roadmap for Europe-wide implementation of such space data-based solutions.

The overarching goal of ACCEND is to establish capabilities and processes that enable the project partners to conduct impactful and exemplary cross-border startup accelerator programmes in Europe - to initiate and establish a long term cross-border startup acceleration service ecosystem. It brings together and enriches a diverse and complementing array of deep tech acceleration services: support in access to finance; advisory in the use of testbeds and living labs for business development; matchmaking with key public procurers of innovation; and global growth coaching advisory targeting global scaleup pathways with go-to-market activities. ACCEND builds shared understanding and trust between the project partners by collaboratively designing joint, distributed Cross-border Startup Accelerator Services that builds on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of each partner and their regional ecosystems; It conducts a pilot programme named ACCEND Accelerator where these complementing services are delivered to a 100+ scale-up companies, aiming towards opening the regional services and funding borders, as well as global markets for these startups. To conduct this successfully, it connects the startup services ecosystem in the partner regions more widely, to leverage local and European initiatives, and to anchor the cross-regional collaboration. The project's ultimate goal is to validate a sustainable model for continuous cross-border Deep Tech acceleration services deployment.

CommuniCity conducts a large number of innovation pilots in many local communities, both urban, peri-urban and rural, including two EU capitals, aiming to empower hard-to-reach and marginalized communities. It creates three cycles of increasing size, building on two dynamic networks of local administrations and living labs of all sizes. CommuniCity builds on recent highlighted and awarded European as well as national place-based and locally-driven innovation programmes, methods, living labs and platforms. It brings the learnings of these together, and devises an inclusive, community-driven, agile innovation and experimentation model. With this model it runs a large co-creation process, first involving local communities in the challenge definitions, then developing innovative solutions through open calls promoted at the European level as well as locally. It will create new insights into local community innovation processes as well as principles and models of how to scale these insights in inclusive and sustainably manners. In addition, CommuniCity will produce a large number of novel innovations anchored in the needs of the local communities, and an exemplary approach that is followed throughout Europe. The core partner cities are already leading and copied smart communities globally because of their diverse approach and ambition to co-create and share learnings. The same goes for the additional four cities and the two networks. The aim is to push the frontier of community-driven innovation much deeper in society and to the margins of society so that the development and testing of novel innovations better serves the needs of the whole society, based on European values, in the world.

Positive clean Energy District’s (PED) are a key building block in the future energy paradigm for carbon-neutral cities and communities. With the rise of modern technology, local digital twins – the digital representations of a functional territory combining low- and high-velocity data with dynamic models – play a significant role in PED development and the scaling of it, supporting decision makers and planners in taking informed decisions towards a sustainable future. However, focusing narrowly on energy and mobility topics confined to the traditional sectors, digital twins for PEDs currently lack representation of significant aspects such as social, economic, and environmental properties, and hence, draw only part of the picture of a district or a city. Limited by data availability and lacking awareness of existing data, this shortcoming in digital twin modelling for PEDs leads to suboptimal decisions, impacting negatively ambitious efforts of sustainable development in cities and communities. This becomes even more clear when reflecting on the scalability issues across the 80.000 municipalities in the EU27: As highly complex entities, cities and communities differ in their physical, social, economic and even cultural structures, making it challenging to replicate PEDs in a trivial way across Europe. The BIPED project demonstrates how to overcome these barriers in a simple yet highly efficient manner that works everywhere by answering three key questions to push PEDs to the next level: wide deployment. Three key questions needs to be addressed to push PEDs to the next level: • How can digital twins be extended to refine a district’s profile representation, guiding PED design and demonstrators? • How can the quantitative collection of soft data support the advancement in digital twin development? • How to boost the replication potential of PED solutions for climate neutral cities with reinforced decision-makings

DUET is an Innovation project designed to leverage the advanced capabilities of cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) to evolve the traditional public policy making cycle using large open data sources. The aim is to help public sector decision-making become more democratic and effective, both in the short and long term, through the development and use of Digital Twins for policy impact exploration and experimentation in entire cities and regions. These digital replicas of a cities system will (a) enhance day-to-day city management by helping city managers react quickly to real-time events through rapid experimentation of different decision impacts, and (b) ensure longer term policy decisions are more effective and trusted by enabling city managers from different units, to explore and discuss with citizens and businesses city issues in a visual, easy-to-digest way via a common view. Thanks to the 3D interface public administrations will, for the first time, more easily harness the collective intelligence of ALL policy stakeholders to tackle complex, systemic policy problems that require innovative thinking from multi-sectors to develop transformative solutions. Developed and tested in cities and Regions at different points in their digital transformation journeys – Flanders Region, Belgium, the City of Athens, Greece and City of Pilsen, Czech Republic – DUET will create the concept of Policy-Ready-Data-as-a-Service and ensure all cities across Europe will be able to create their own their own Digital Twins that address ethical considerations around data use whilst also complying with Europe’s stringent privacy and security regulations.