Barcelona, one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, is pioneering a new model of urban regeneration: superilles (also known as superblocks). The approach consists of pacifying streets in entire neighborhoods, creating more liveable public space, and promoting sustainable behaviour change. The objective of the project “Teixint Superilles” – which translates from Catalan as “Weaving superblocks” – is to approach superilles from a bottom-up perspective, engaging citizens throughout the process.
Through a series of workshops, Aquí has been experimenting with diverse methodologies for civic participation while engaging a wide range of participants with topics of gender, functional diversity, cross-generational inclusivity, and sustainability. Teixint Superilles activities took place in three different environments to ensure a wide range of participants: a public park, an arts and sustainability festival and a secondary school. The target groups of these activities were neighbours of superilles and the end-users of these spaces: local businesses and municipal workers, visitors, and people in transit. To increase representation from younger citizens, aquí engaged students from a local school through a co-creation process to redesign their local square.

The core activity of the project was to design a green or blue solution to mitigate the impact of climate change through design and to build a natural space to help to cool public spaces in Lyon. Place Saint-Jean was chosen as the experimentation site in Lyon, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This means that nothing could be planted including on roofs and facades and no water features added. For this reason, we focused on a mobile garden that was built in the Lyon Pressin Horticultural School and then moved into the Place Saint-Jean. To be mobile meant that the garden must be the same size as a wooden pallet, which is a major constraint.

A strong and efficient mobilisation of the involved partners was managed according to the work plan, enabling indirect exchanges between citizens and high-school students to design and build the green solution in accordance with the expectations of citizens.

The main impact of the project for Lyon City is the fact, that the experimentations have been conducted in Lyon and the methodology deployed in this project could be replicated within the city of Lyon and in other cities too. Due to the seasonality of the project the monitoring campaign planned for spring, summer and the early autumn 2022 to assess the benefit of the green solution in terms of cooling. Two devices were implemented: one near the garden and one at the opposite side of the green solution, to witness the changes brought by the green solution. RESALLIENCE will then be able to quantify the difference of temperature and humidity between the two sites and the benefits in terms of cooling.

The project “Lugoj: For kids, by kids” improved the public space in the town of Lugoj, Romania through an innovative grassroots approach, by connecting pupils with the public administration.

The main objectives of “Lugoj – For kids, by kids” was to co-identify -together with students- the obstacles children face when cycling to school, in using the relevant urban infrastructures, and co-creating solutions to these challenges. The secondary aim of the pupil engagement phase was to stimulate their participation and involvement in the decision-making processes of their school by forming a long-term working group to deal with school projects.

All the project outcomes and solutions proposed and the interactive maps were delivered to the municipality of Lugoj in order to take action in the future and improve the infrastructure. The project outcomes, including the solutions and the challenges will be integrated into the Sustainable Urban Mobility Development Strategy of Lugoj.

The Istanbul Mobility Lab within Dudullu metro station specialises in the theme of future mobility to design and create solutions to the city’s existing transportation and mobility problems for citizens and entrepreneurs. The Dudullu metro station fitted well to the RAPID 3D model project because the 3D model of the station and the Mobility Lab have been live since 2021, just before the official opening of the metro station.

The City of Istanbul has done important work regarding citizen behavioural profiles to reflect the diverse communities across the city. Based on these citizen behaviour profiles, avatars were created to simulate moving through the digital space. The vision and the strategy of the model aligned to the local settings and linked real-life citizen profiles and their needs to the project in an inclusive, democratic and open perspective. There was an iterative process for identifying these characteristics which was valuable to help identify potential blockages or “pinch points” and give opportunities to use this for citizen engagement. Under-represented groups such as people with accessibility problems, people with different transportation preferences, women with children, people with disabilities, urban refugees, and others were represented in the 3D visual imagery and supplemented with subtitles in different languages.

A promotional Video was created to engage different stakeholder groups in the Mobility Lab within Dudullu metro station.

Since 2020, the Municipality of Barcelona has set the project, Protegim les escoles (Protecting schools), as a high priority strategy to provide Barcelona’s schools with safe, comfortable, and healthy public spaces that act as meeting places for children, their families and neighbours. By 2030, it is intended that all 585 schools in Barcelona will offer safe and comfortable surroundings. Within this context, FURNISH emerges as an opportunity to help with this pacification, but also to go further.

FURNISH generated a series of Mobile Urban Elements (MUE) designed to be temporarily installed in two public spaces within a collaborative process. From September 2021 to December 2021, a series of activities were successfully implemented in the city of Barcelona with the support of its municipality installing two FURNISH prototypes at the entrances to two state schools.

The first MUE was placed in Entença school in the district of Eixample. This school has 20 teachers and 275 pupils, of which 150 are from 3 to 6 years old, and 125 from 6 to 9. This school is located next to a main street, which suffers from several issues including noise and air pollution, and vehicles driving at high speed making it unsafe. The project at Entença school adapted the entrance to the school to integrate the outer walls of the old Modelo Prison and installed safe, wooden elements in front of the school.

Smart Points all over Europe help decarbonise last-mile logistics (from gig economies, to retail magnates) and are quickly becoming the standard of sustainable delivery of products and services to Smart Buildings and Smart Cities.

geoFluxus is a spin-off company from the Delft University of Technology and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute), based on 4 years of research on the circular economy and sustainable logistics in the built environment. Our ‘Waste Profile’ is the world’s first web-application on which companies can find more nearby and sustainable solutions for their waste materials. In October 2020, geoFluxus was awarded the first prize from the European Commission as most promising platform to deliver the ‘EU Green Deal’.

Autonomous Knight is a Belgian based technology company developing patented multi-spectral camera systems to fasttrack automation levels in time critical processes in the autonomous mobility, aerospace, industrial automation, security & defense

The quality of life in European metropolitan areas is under pressure. A steady increase of the population in combination with the rapid expansion of city tourism frequently causes crowd-related issues. In recent years, universities, research institutes and municipalities have developed techniques to A) monitor crowd movements by means of the state-of-the-art crowd sensing systems, and B) pro-actively manage crowded spaces using real-time decision support systems. These ad hoc and specialist pilots have shown that the liveability of the inner cities can be improved substantially by means of pro-active crowd management, but are currently not ready for large scale deployment. 

The objective of CityFlows is twofold, namely to i) improve liveability in urban environments by deploying a crowd monitoring decision support system (CM-DSS) on a city-scale and ii) to make a CM-DSS ready for the international market. The main goal is to improve the liveability of crowded pedestrian spaces through the provision of decision-support for the management of pedestrian flows. The first objective is to operate the CityFlows CM-DSS in four living labs across Europe, which will demonstrate that any professional, whose ambition is to improve the service, throughput or safety, can use the CM-DSS to re-design and manage crowded pedestrian spaces. Large pilots are organized in the City of Amsterdam (ArenA Boulevard & COVID-19 living lab), Milan (Milano Centrale) and Barcelona (Parc Guell), which all feature state-of-the-art crowd monitoring systems and analysis techniques. 

CityFlows’ secondary objective is to create an active and involved user-base for CM-DSSs through the education of city officials, security officers and crowd management organisations regarding the benefits of this type of decision-support system in the process. CityFlows aims to accelerate the market opportunities of the CityFlows CM-DSS, and innovative pro-active pedestrian management systems in general through education, hands-on experience/direct involvement and communication.