GrowSmarter brought together cities and industry to integrate and demonstrate ‘12 smart city solutions’ in energy, infrastructure and transport, to provide other cities with valuable insights on how the solutions work in practice. The Lighthouse cities together with industrial partners implemented and evaluated the solutions for energy efficiency, greenhouse gas saving capacity, economic viability and economic impact and replicability.
3 Lighthouse cities
GrowSmarter aimed to stimulate city uptake of the ‘smart solutions’ using the three Lighthouse cities Stockholm, Cologne and Barcelona to show how 'smart solutions' work in practice. The solutions were tested in 3 different city areas – representative for many European cites: downtown city district, inner city suburb about to be densified and a former industrial/business area which is being partly turned into a residential area.
Stockholm, Cologne and Barcelona selected a site in their city where the 12 smart solutions were rolled out. The three Lighthouse cities hosted free of charge study visits and European workshops, which provided opportunities to see the technological applications of the smart solutions and meet the 25 industrial partners in GrowSmarter.
Targets and evaluation
The scope of the project was to:
• demonstrate and validate 12 economically and environmentally sustainable integrated smart solutions;
• foster collaboration between cities, businesses and academia to transform the smart solutions into business models to be rolled out across Europe;
• improve the quality of life for European citizens, reduce environmental impact and create sustainable economic development.
The demonstrations in the Lighthouse cities were not the primary aim, but a means to contribute to solving city challenges and create validated business cases to initiate a market roll out of the smart solutions to Follower cities, and to the rest of the European market, thus helping Europe Grow Smarter.
The 12 solutions were designed to meet the three pillars of sustainability: economic, social and environmental concerns. Targets related to climate change, energy usage, transport emissions and jobs were set as part of the evaluation.
Knowledge replication
Knowledge exchange and transfer was a key to the success of GrowSmarter. The five Follower cities Valletta, Suceava, Porto, Cork and Graz closely followed the Lighthouse cities to learn from their experiences and to identify measures suitable for their specific local context. As part of the project, they developed a smart city replication plan tailored to their local needs.
Project duration and funding
The GrowSmarter project received funding of €25 million from the European Commission’s ‘Smart cities and communities’ Horizon2020 research and innovation programme. The GrowSmarter project worked closely together with the other Lighthouse projects to maximise the impact and exchange of experiences. GrowSmarter kicked off on 1 January 2015 and ended 31 December 2019. For more information, visit the project website www.grow-smarter.eu or follow us on Twitter @EUGrowSmarter.
