By Paul Bevan - 18th November 2011
The city in its role as regulator, planner, procurer; and city leaders with the vision to build political consensus, cultivate cooperation with neighbouring areas and stakeholders, and connect directly to the citizens
Paul Bevan
A better designed budget and meaningful investment in our cities will give Europe the strong impact it needs, writes Paul Bevan.
Achieving smarter cities will be a decisive step on Europe’s path to green growth and recovery. Cities account for 80 per cent of energy use.
They are therefore the places where the greatest difference can be made to energy efficiency and emissions, especially in transport and buildings.
Producing 85 per cent of the European Union’s GDP, cities are also the main population and employment centres: the key pulling factors, the international brands, the main drivers of the regional economy and beyond, of service provision and job creation.
Our European model of well-managed urban concentration is the most sustainable form of development for the future.
The management of that concentration: how we engage with citizens, deliver services, control our traffic, optimise public transport, deliver cost-efficient and effective solutions for our inhabitants, better use our resources, support entrepreneurs and SMEs, will increasingly involve the use of new technologies.
But these new solutions must be well adapted to meet the needs on the ground and integrated into a city ‘ecosystem’ - that supports and maximises their impact.
As centres of economic activity and markets, cities offer a critical mass and are ‘living labs’ for market, public and social innovation that address concrete challenges, whether economic, social or environmental or indeed all three.
New integrated solutions can be conceived, piloted and rolled out in city neighbourhoods before scaling up to whole territories.
The city in its role as regulator, planner, procurer; and city leaders with the vision to build political consensus, cultivate cooperation with neighbouring areas and stakeholders, and connect directly to the citizens.
The Eurocities green digital charter is an excellent example of a smart city approach. With 23 city signatories, and another three lined up to sign before the end of this year, it offers a framework for information and communication technologies (ICT) as a driver for energy efficiency.
The aim is to reduce emissions from ICT themselves, but also to exploit the restructuring potential ICT provides in other areas.
By signing the charter cities commit to deploy five large scale pilots each by 2015 and to decrease the direct carbon footprint of ICTs per city by 30 per cent by 2020.
Our newest Eurocities project ‘Networking intelligent cities for energy efficiency’ (NiCE) will support the implementation with tools for signatories to report on progress.
It links our charter directly in with the covenant of mayors, to highlight the ICT dimension of cities’ efforts to increase energy efficiency and will provide technical training, peer-to-peer discussions and targeted exchanges to support cities in the practical implementation of the measures.
But smart cities are not just about technology. It is also about finding smarter ways of working, through new partnerships and across traditional disciplines, targeting interventions to the most appropriate territorial scale, whether city district, core city, or wider metropolitan area.
At European level, the smart cities agenda should also join up policies: from energy, information society, transport, research and innovation to regional policy.
The urban dimension of all of these sectors is essential to delivering the 2020 goals, and it all comes together in our smart cities.
The EU budget 2014-2020 should also reflect this integrated approach. Meaningful investments in our cities and metropolitan areas can drive social, economic and territorial development across the EU.
A budget better designed to equip our cities will help ensure the stronger impact that Europe needs to deliver on the 2020 objectives
