European municipalities, especially cities, are responsible for a high share of global CO2 emissions. This mainly stems from their heating, electricity and mobility sectors. At the same time, they are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. They should therefore ambitiously strive for a comprehensive energy transition on their own territory. Often, however, sectorial approaches within the municipalities’ administrations impede ambitious next steps to bring about necessary change. With its holistic view urban planning can play a key role to balance different interests and to develop coherent mitigation strategies that address the most important challenges simultaneously. Urban planning, therefore, helps translating abstract political mitigation goals into concrete spatial implications.
Undoubtedly, climate-friendly cross-sectoral (re)development of municipalities is a mammoth task. It is an inevitable task, however, to achieve/preserve livable spaces – locally as well as globally. If existing, mostly fossil fuel based, municipal infrastructures and lifestyles are not drastically altered climate change will be further accelerated. This, in turn, threatens the quality of life of billions of people around the globe and may lead to disruptive societal developments. European municipalities that follow ambitious mitigation paths therefore act in the public as well as in their self-interest. They can be an important role model and inspiration to others, too.
The overall objective of the MULTIPLY project is to make better use of the expertise of urban planners for climate mitigation issues. Their holistic view on optimizing spatial challenges, while minimizing CO2 emissions, is especially valuable. The project tries to raise awareness for the good approaches this discipline has to offer, both nationally and European wide. To this end a capacity development process is set up that features targeted peer learning workshops between forerunner and committed cities in the six project countries (Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Sweden). It makes best practice examples of forerunner cities known to a wider public and motivates committed cities to follow these good examples.
The following main conclusions can be drown from the project:
Peer learning settings are a great way to get the most out of municipal networks in limited time. All participants enjoyed the open exchange atmosphere and were stimulated to think into new directions and start collective and creative problem solving processes. We therefore strongly recommend to further work with similar settings on the municipal level in future EU projects and beyond.
The district level bears a lot of potential – especially for bigger cities and highly urbanized regions. The district level is the perfect intermediate level between citywide scope and building scope. In contrast to a narrow building scope solutions implemented at district level can trigger far bigger – an far more economic - impacts in terms of energy savings and CO2 reductions. In contrast to a citywide scope it allows for quicker changes and – too a certain level – also ‘experiments’.
Although a lot of synergies with other municipal networks could be realized (e. g. ICLEI, Covenant of Mayors etc.) it must be emphasized that an even closer collaboration with existing networks seems most promising. When designing similar municipal projects in the future it seems reasonable to fully integrate them in the existing structure of well-functioning European/global municipal networks.
