STARDUST serves as smart connector bringing together advanced European cities and citizens of Pamplona (ES), Tampere (FI) and Trento (IT) - with the associated follower cities of Derry (UK), Kozani (GR) and Litomerice (CZ). These six cities, collaborating with relevant industrial partners, including a variety of innovative local SME, and supported by academia and research centres will demonstrate three lighthouse cities, deploy intelligent integration measures, test and validate technical solutions and innovative business models, and deliver blueprints for replication throughout Europe and abroad. The objective of STARDUST project is to pave the way towards the transformation of the carbon supplied cities into Smart, high efficient, intelligent and citizen oriented cities, developing urban technical green solutions and innovative business models, integrating the domains of buildings, mobility and efficient energy through ICT, testing and validating these solutions, enabling their fast roll out in the market . The core idea of the STARDUST project is the demonstration of different “innovation islands” as urban incubators of technological, social, regulatory and market solutions which, once validated, could contribute to this objective of transformation of our cities towards Smart Cities. The integrated approach of STARDUST is based in the combination of technological solutions with human being reflected in joint decision making, economic constraints, citizen’s governance, etc. The STARDUST Smart City concept has been designed to enhance the integration of all these aspects to define a new Urban Metabolism.

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.

INTERLINK aims to overcome the barriers preventing administrations to reuse and share services with private partners (including citizens) by developing a novel collaborative governance model that merges the enthusiasm and flexibility of grassroot initiatives with the legitimacy and accountability granted by top-down e-government frameworks. We believe that a solution incorporating the strengths of these two approaches will be able to overcome their individual limitations, namely lack of involvement of private actors, transparency and trust for “top-down” and lack of sustainability, accountability, and legitimacy for “bottom-up” initiatives. To enable this, INTERLINK will provide a set of digital building blocks, called “Interlinkers”, that implement the defined governance model and standardize the basic functionalities needed to enable private actors to co-operate in the delivery of a service (organization, communication, scheduling, monitoring, etc.). In this way, the new shared service will maintain the effectiveness of digital solutions adopted in grassroots initiatives to support self-organization and make collective decisions, and at the same time fulfill the technical and legal requirements necessary for adoption by Public Administrations (PAs). The INTERLINK multidisciplinary consortium will deliver the new governance model and Interlinkers within a technological framework and operational platform based on an open software system leveraging on mobile communications, facilitating the co-production of services between PAs and private stakeholders. The solution will be customised, deployed and evaluated on three use-cases within the partner PAs: the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, the Latvian Ministry of Regional Development, and the City of Zaragoza. Lessons learned in the three use-cases will be generalized to deliver a re-usable solution across Europe.

USAGE (Urban Data Space for Green Deal) aims to provide solutions and mechanisms for making city-level environmental and climate data available to everyone based on FAIR principles. USAGE will support the implementation of the European strategy for data and various European Green Deal priority actions at the level where climate change is mostly felt: cities and towns. USAGE will provide innovative governance mechanisms, consolidated arrangements, AI-based tools and data analytics to share, access and use city-level data from Earth Observation (EO), Internet of Things (IoT), authoritative and crowd sources, leveraging on standards for data and service interoperability. USAGE wants to become a decentralized infrastructure for trustworthy data collection, processing and exchange based on commonly agreed principles, facilitating the combination of heterogeneous data for policy analysis. USAGE will validate its solutions in four diverse pilot areas located in four different countries, focusing also on the reusability of the solutions in other urban areas. The consortium consists of 11 interdisciplinary partners from 5 European countries and, within the 3 years of activities, will also realize a long-term sustainability and growth strategy plan of project solutions.

Indoor air pollution, an emerging threat recognized by European society, is claiming millions of lives annually. In the heat of current COVID-19 pandemic, elevated exposure to indoor air pollutants due to increased time spent indoors further faces a significant increase in negative effect on both physical and mental health and well-being not only in Europe, but also worldwide. When it comes to indoor air quality itself, serious knowledge gaps remain in understanding complex nature of indoor-outdoor pollution relationships, pollution sources and exposure pathways, health effects of emerging pollutants, ventilation of indoor spaces on wide spatial and long temporal scales. This is mainly because air quality monitoring in European Union (EU) is primarily focused on outdoor air quality, which paradoxically is a result of regulatory target compliances, which is lacking for indoor environments. To increase the resilience of EU for emerging threats of indoor air pollution and to promote living and working in healthy environments, project EDIAQI aims at conducting characterization of sources and routes of exposure and dispersion of chemical, biological, and emerging indoor air pollution in multiple cities in EU. Quantification of the main properties of pollutants and processes that governs its fate in indoor environments will be investigated on two levels: a) the-state-of-the-art, small-scale, high-intensity scientific focus measurement campaigns; and b) long-term, large-scale monitoring of target indoor air pollutants. The chosen project strategy for developing, characterization, and deployment of cost-effective/user-friendly monitoring solutions, together with the-state-of-the-art scientific instrumentation will allow to create new knowledge on sources, routes of exposure, and body burdens of indoor multipollutant.