CLIMABOROUGH is founded on a staged methodology with 5 complementary and interdependent steps. The first actions of the project will be to establish and consolidate the Cities in Hubs. The whole structure will be supported by two “City Angel” partners (Energy Cities & Urban Lab) taking the operational responsibility for each theme together with their related cities.
OUR METHODOLOGY
The co-creation process of CLIMABOROUGH is based on three sub-steps:
(a) Building Systemic Innovation Capacity,
(b) Codification and Packaging of Solutions, and
(c) Data co-creation between cities.
The CLIMABOROUGH’s ambition is to showcase to city managers, decision makers and other stakeholders across Europe the benefits and impacts (economic, environmental and social) of adopting the solutions co-developed with innovative SMEs and startups, and user communities, then demonstrated in several urban locations.
This will strengthen their confidence and drive mitigation and adaptation, building their capacity to collectively contribute to climate neutrality.
This process will demonstrate, as requested and proposed by the New European Bauhaus (NEB), the vital role that art and culture play, as value-generating agents as well as engagement drivers, throughout the co-design process, acting both at levels of solution definition/development and attractiveness/marketing/adoption.
This cross-disciplinary perspective will require considerable engagement and mentoring of ‘conventional’ technicians involved in infrastructure and service design activities. The City Angels will play important roles to ensure the Mission pillars remain in balance with other aspects of development.
The goal of public procurement of innovation (structured in two consecutive rounds during the project’s lifetime) is to provide to all leader cities and, later, follower cities the services and products corresponding to their needs. To this end, each of the 8 leading European cities identified above will be supported by a federated public procurement of innovation call, managed by ANCI and potentially benefiting the remaining 7.
Same will happen for the follower cities to fulfil the replication and scalability goal of the project.
Why this approach?
It is fundamental to align the leader cities (and later the followers) as a single call procedure in every city would represent a bottleneck hardly solvable, but this is just one part of our story.
Public procurement is an excellent tool, particularly if used in federating various cities and communities, to give visibility to it and to attract an important number of startups and SMEs with stand alone solutions with a high potential, but not yet valorized. This innovative tool, adopted by the Designscapes project, will represent an excellent value to drive cities out of their usual chains and bottlenecks and to launch a very innovative process.
See also
Once the public procurement will have made it possible to define climate products and services useful for cities, it will be necessary to deploy them and to test them in real conditions to evaluate the results.
CLIMABOROUGH has defined its demonstration stages in three cycles concentrated on testing the functioning, accuracy and effectiveness of technical and non-technical outputs with the various stakeholders involved in the definition of the services and any others involved.
At the end of every cycle, the demonstrators, linked to datasets (see step 4c), will be evaluated to define:
– the usefulness of the solution,
– the impact on urban planning efficiency and
– the impact on climate neutrality.
Leader cities will then have a first prototyping cycle of 5 months, consisting of the deployment and the collection of data useful for the evaluation, later followed by small cycle of evaluation (1 month), useful to deploy the service again with eventual improvements, before a final evaluation, necessary to benchmark the service for mentoring and replication.
The conclusions will be drawn after those cycles as to define
(1) which are the main determinants of the acceptance and use of the solution(s),
(2) its impact on climate neutrality,
(3) eventual needs of improvements, and
(4) what are the best conditions for future deployments.
The third cycle will be done by replication, allowing follower cities to deploy services deployed in leader cities and the project tools (platform and the climate neutrality monitoring tool).
CLIMABOROUGH will define a Monitoring tool, based on a set of Performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the change in crucial sectors for reaching climate neutrality and quantify the project impacts.
The indicators will track progress towards the net zero emissions and help define the most appropriate planning strategies to ensure the achievement of key and specific objectives.
This effort will request to have a platform and data to analyse, then this step will be done on a 3 sub-steps approach:
(a) building the project Data Platform,
(b) collect from startup services and cities the data and
(c) define the evaluation with KPIs and the related target values.
CLIMABOROUGH will work on one hand to produce a replication plan at the level of the municipality/city involved in the project consisting of identification of project results’ potential and possible pathways of using them in the future and on the other hand to work on experience exchange and knowledge transfer between pilot projects.
The latter will aim to make a comparative study of the implemented experiments, from all relevant points of view. It will be done to increase replicability and facilitate dissemination.
Two joint meetings will be organised by Energy Cities, with the support of Urban Lab, with Partner cities to inform them about the elaboration of the replication plan and exchange knowledge transfer between pilot projects and several bilateral meetings to concentrate on each city replication plan.
The followers that will be interested in replicating a service/product will be then supported by City Angels to fully replicate the cycle of the leader cities.
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