Sharing Cities has four key objectives. 1) To achieve scale in the European smart cities market by proving that properly designed smart city solutions, based around common needs, can be integrated in complex urban environments. This will be done in a way that exhibits their true potential and allows for the significant scale-up and consequent increase in social, economic and environmental value. 2) Adopt a digital first approach which proves the extent to which ICT integration can improve and connect up existing infrastructure, as well as the design and running of new city infrastructure. This will also allow for the creation of a new set of next stage digital services which will help citizens make better and beneficial choices around energy efficiency and mobility, which when scaled up will enhance the city’s ability to hit key targets for mobility, housing, energy efficiency and resilience, and economic development. 3) Accelerate the market to understand, develop and trial business, investment and governance models, essential for the true aggregation and replication (through collaboration) of smart city solutions in cities of different sizes and maturities. In doing this, we intend to accelerate the pace by which we make transformative improvements, and enhance sustainability in communities. 4) Share and collaborate for society: to respond to increasing demand for participation; to enhance mechanisms for citizens’ engagement; to improve local governments capacity for policy making and service delivery through collaboration and co-design; resulting in outcomes that are better for citizens, businesses and visitors. These will be delivered by a range of expert partners across 8 work packages.

Parking management should be an important part of sustainable urban mobility planning (SUMP) but unfortunately, it is one the most underdeveloped segments. Most EU member states lack national level policy and guidance on parking. PARK4SUMP aims to change this, because good parking management has proved to be of utmost importance. It frees the public space, supports local businesses, reduces search travel, generates revenue, increases safety, supports urban planning and can make cities more attractive. The general concept is to take the very best parking management examples, contexts and expertise in Europe, learn and profit from these, and transfer them on a large scale and in the best way possible to new cities . This covers raising awareness and gaining acceptance among relevant stakeholders; building capacity, particularly among cities that have difficulty in picking up such policies; stimulating further innovation; and achieving wide roll-out and transferability. Park4SUMP will work on traffic and travel avoidance; it will support less car dependent lifestyles and put into practise innovations in planning and location policy. It will also optimise the use of existing infrastructure. Furthermore the modal shift towards more efficient modes like walking, cycling and public transport will be encouraged. Convincing arguments to incorporate parking management can be given : it has low costs, it pays for itself, it delivers money, it is easy to implement and to modify and it can be done in incremental steps. The main expected impact will be cities with strongly improved parking policies that are creatively used to improve the quality of life and business in cities and develop the cities in a more sustainable way. Park4SUMP aims to establish parking management as an essential part of SUMPS of its leading, follower and external follower cities. Park4SUMP will deliver behaviour change whilst generating revenue.

inteGRIDy aims to integrate cutting-edge technologies, solutions and mechanisms in a scalable Cross-Functional Platform connecting energy networks with diverse stakeholders, facilitating optimal and dynamic operation of the Distribution Grid (DG), fostering the stability and coordination of distributed energy resources and enabling collaborative storage schemes within an increasing share of renewables. inteGRIDy will: a) Integrate innovative smart grid technologies, enabling optimal and dynamic operation of the distribution system’s assets within high grid reliability and stability standards b) Validate innovative Demand Response technologies and relevant business models c) Utilize storage technologies and their capabilities to relieve the DG and enable significant avoidance of RES curtailment, enhancing self-consumption and net metering d) Enable interconnection with transport and heat networks, forming Virtual Energy Network synergies ensuring energy security e) Provide modelling & profiling extraction for network topology representation, innovative DR mechanisms and Storage characterization, facilitating decision making in DG’s operations f) Provide predictive, forecasting tools & scenario-based simulation, facilitating an innovative Operation Analysis Framework g) Develop new business and services to create value for distribution domain stakeholders and end users/prosumers in an emerging electricity market. inteGRIDy will impact on: a) operations by reconfigurable topology control & supervision b) market by providing new services c) customer by enhanced engagement through DR mechanisms d) transmission by novel forecasting scenarios for the MV/LV areas e) part of the production incorporating innovative storage targeting the optimum use of RES f) environment by CO2 reduction inteGRIDy approach will be deployed and validated in 6 large-scale and 4 small-scale real-life demonstration covering different climatic zones and markets with different maturity.