Two of the biggest challenges that almost every city faces are pollution and traffic congestion, they have a very negative impact on the health of citizens and effect greatly the quality of life for all citizens. There has been a lot written about autonomous cars and the electrification of vehicles, but one thing that has not been looked at in so much detail is new forms of transport. Solutions that allow for the easy movement of citizens around cities and that have a carbon

Energy efficiency and improving long term sustainability is very close to top of the list for most politicians and city administrations, we all realise that in order for us to continue improving our way of life that we need to find new and innovative ways to create energy and power our cities. As part of the SINFONIA Project 2 pilot pilot cities will become smart energy cities, this means in practice that in selected districts there will be up to 50 percent savings in primary

STOP-IT: Strategic, Tactical, Operational Protection of Water Infrastructure against Cyber-Physical Threats I bet right now you are thinking “that is quite a name”, I know I was when I first started researching the STOP-IT project. Whilst the name may be a little long winded the importance of the project is certainly not. One of the most important pieces of national infrastructure is water supply, without it society would struggle quite quickly to continue operating efficient

Graz, Austria is the next city that we are focussing on as part of our exclusive set of interviews in the build up to Smart Cities Live in London next month. So far we have heard from Dubai, Lapinjärvi (Finland) and an overview of what has been going on in Slovenia when it comes to smart city development. Earlier this week I caught up with Christian Nußmüller from the City of Graz in Austria. Christian is the Senior Project Manager in Graz and is heavily involved in their sma

The UNaLAB project is yet another project funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 program. It is aimed at finding responses to climate change in a sustainable way, through nature-based solutions. The goal of the project is to demonstrate innovative systems for water management using an ecological approach. Aim of the UNALAB Project All around the world, major transformations are occurring, and the environment is becoming more and more vulnerable and exposed to ris

Creating smarter cities is not only about the public sector using technology to make a better use of resources, but a big responsibility also falls on the private sector to do more to reduce their impact on the planet, especially those sectors that currently add to the environmental pressure on cities. Organisations that are in one way or another responsible for the transport of goods, services or citizens must start to look at the way that they operate with the aim of reduci

Innovation in information technology and communication is a key element in the transformation of cities. From a technological perspective, there must be a specific degree of standardisation in urban ICT networks. These standards should be equally open to municipal administrations, businesses and citizens and allow innovative solutions to be built from the bottom up. The ESPRESSO project is a project funded by the Horizon 2020 program and has 16 partners from eight different E

In the coming weeks we will be bringing you a series of articles about different Horizon 2020 projects, but before we do that we thought that it would be interesting to take an overview of the program and how it is helping to drive innovation in sustainability across Europe. Horizon 2020 is the most ambitious research and innovation program that the European Union (EU) has ever run and it is expected to lead to further breakthroughs and discoveries in sustainable development