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.

Depopulation, mostly characterized by emigration of young people, is occurring in rural areas all over Europe. This has brought to an ageing phenomenon, as well as the emergence of several structural problems such as fewer job opportunities, degradation of infrastructures and a decreasing offer of services of general interest. However, the revolution in digitalisation with an increase of remote and location-free work opportunities is offering the chance to redirect some rural migration flows back. Interventions are thus needed to take up this opportunity and build on trends such as multi-local living to promote new greener, smaller, sustainable and innovative growth models. It is there where SMART ERA intervenes. The project will foster resilience in rural areas, by upgrading and co-designing, co-developing and co-validating with local communities a set of smart solutions, integrated within Smart Innovation Packages (SIPs) able to tackle pressing socio-economic and environmental challenges and promote a community-led transition pathway that will empower rural people to act for change. SMART ERA’s main ambitions are: a) building the first large-scale European-wide solution for systematic rural data screening and smartness analysis; b) using co-design methods and techniques to involve residents and stakeholders in the design and validation of SIPs, as well as in the collection of old and creation of new data sources; c) proposing a unified Smartness/Digital Maturity assessment method; d) providing unique and timely evidence-based and performance-focused recommendations to upgrade the new local, national and European policy instruments and enhance their efficiency and efficacy in supporting smart villages across the EU; e) fostering cooperation among pilot regions, as well as among the four EU macro-regional strategies and improve their rural communities’ ability to address socio-economic and environmental challenges.

The mobility ecosystem is rapidly evolving, whereby we see the rise of new stakeholders and services. Examples of these are the presence of connected and automated vehicles, a large group of organisations that rally to establish various forms of share mobility, with the pinnacle being all of these incorporated into a large Maas ecosystem. As these new forms of mobility offerings start to appear within cities, so do the new ways in which data are being generated, collected, and stored. Analysing this (Big) data with suitable (artificial intelligence) techniques becomes more paramount, as it leads to insights in the performance of certain mobility solutions, and is able to highlight (mobility) needs of citizens in a broader context, in addition to a rise in new risks and various socio-economic impacts. Successfully integrating all these disruptive technologies and solutions with the designs of policy makers remains a challenge at current. let alone being able to analyse, monitor and, assess mobility solutions and their potential socio-economic impacts. nuMIDAS bridges this (knowledge) gap, by providing insights into what methodological tools, databases, and models are required, and how existing ones need to be adapted or augmented with new data. To this end, it starts from insights obtained through (market) research and stakeholders, as well as quantitative modelling. A wider applicability of the project’s results across the whole EU is guaranteed as all the research is validated within a selection of case studies in pilot cities, with varying characteristics, thereby giving more credibility to these results. Finally, through an iterative approach, nuMIDAS creates a tangible and readily available toolkit that can be deployed elsewhere, including a set of transferability guidelines, thus thereby contributing to the further adoption and exploitation of the project’s results.