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.

UNCHAIN will “break the chains”, boosting the cooperation between public authorities and logistics stakeholders. It will create a set of services for optimal and flexible urban logistics operation, management, planning and policymaking, unleashing the potential that technology and digitalisation can bring to the sustainable urban logistics and moving towards climate-neutral and smart cities. UNCHAIN will implement a standardised and reliable data exchange ecosystem supported by a public-private collaborative framework that will allow the establishment of reliable data sharing agreements, break data silos and make the urban freight data more available and accessible. Driven by the unlocked data, an innovative set of 12 urban logistics services will be implemented to optimise the allocation of urban space, improve the policy-making capacity of local authorities and optimise network management and logistics operation. With UNCHAIN, public authorities will improve their data collection capabilities and have the right tools to achieve sustainability goals. Meanwhile, for operators, having services aligned with their own and society's objectives will unlock mutually beneficial cooperation schemes, a key factor for long-term collaboration and the establishment of sustainable urban freight transport policies and operations. 10 European cities will participate in UNCHAIN activities: Madrid, Berlin and Florence as living labs; Prague, Mechelen, Madeira and Riga as follower cities, and Brest metropole, Ravenna and Alba Iulia as peer- cities supporting the early adoption of the results. Also, the well-balanced representation of the urban logistics industry, with DHL and UPS, will ensure large-scale impact and feasibility of the project results.

URBREATH vision is to develop, implement, demonstrate, validate and replicate a comprehensive, community participation and NBS-driven urban revitalisation, resilience and climate neutrality paradigm that will ultimately radically enhance the social interactions, inclusion, equitability and liveability in cities. Specifically, the aim of the URBREATH project is to implement hybrid/Natural Base Solutions putting at the heart of the decision-making process the communities within a city. Advanced techniques, particularly Local Digital Twins and AI, and social innovation will facilitate the achievement of its vision. The project will have four phases: 1. Inception, 2. Development, 3. Piloting, 4. Transition. The preliminary results of a single Phase are evaluated within the following Phase so to allow for feedback before releasing the final version. The Inception phase will define the methodology to be followed for the project development and will deliver the project functional and technical requirements. The second phase will release the URBREATH technical framework, consisting of tools to manage the whole data value chain and to support end-users to collaborate on the design and creation of NBS to be used in the city/district. It will be used to monitor and take decisions on the NBS to be implemented/deployed in the Piloting phase (evidence-based decision making), that involves 4 Front Runner Cities in 4 different climatic zones: Cluj-Napoca (RO - Continental), Leuven (BE Atlantic), Madrid (ES Mediterranean), and Tallin (EE Boreal). During the Transition phase, all the information, results and lessons learnt from the previous steps will be collected and analysed to provide recommendations and foster replication activities and the uptake of project outputs at the end of its lifespan. To this aim, 5 Follower Cities are involved: Aarhus (DK), Athens (EL), Kajaani (FI), Parma (IT), Pilsen (CZ), linked to the Front Runners for climatic zone and/or dimension.