Cities face an enormous challenge in becoming resilient, healthy places to live while reaching net-zero-emissions in just a few short years. EIT Climate-KIC is working with 15 of the most ambitious mayors, municipalities and city communities in Europe to design portfolios of joined-up innovations capable of unlocking wholesale transformation across all city systems – from mobility to waste, from energy to health, and the built environment. Our first cohort of partners includes Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Kraków, Križevci, Leuven, Madrid, Malmö, Maribor, Milan, Niš, Orléans, Sarajevo, Skopje and Vienna.
Our work is informed by more than 10 years of experience in urban sustainability gathered through EIT Climate-KIC‘s large-scale programmes and flagship initiatives, notably Smart, Sustainable Districts (SSD), City Finance Lab, and Building Technology Accelerator (BTA). Furthermore, EIT Climate-KIC brings the interdisciplinary professional expertise of the Cities team, including our design partners Bankers without Boundaries, Dark Matter Labs, The Democratic Society, the Global Covenant of Mayors and Material Economics.
Innovation-as-usual, which is typically ‘siloed’ and focused on supplying the market with technology-led solutions, is not going to deliver a just, inclusive world within 1.5-degrees of warming from pre-industrial levels. Innovation is essential, but have not risen to the challenge in the scale we now need. We need innovation to catalyse systemic change through a portfolio approach informed by a collaborative narrative.
Within the framework of our Deep Demonstration of Healthy, Clean Cities (HCC), we are developing a set of ‘positions’ aimed at moving beyond the current common understanding of climate action. A ‘Position’ refers to ‘where’ we intend to place something in order to induce an effect in a system. It places us where we can discover how to catalyse change. A ‘Problem Space’ is a space for action within a system or across multiple systems.
The Positions we have identified in cities are:
Problem Spaces within cities are:
What we learned from our current and past programmes is that several constituent elements for transformative action within cities Problem Spaces have been developed and tested, so that practical examples, insights and learning resources are available. The challenge lies in the ability to orchestrate individual elements within a portfolio of strategic experiments that are coherent with a city’s vision.
We see each of our Positions as entry points for our vision to co-create a prosperous, inclusive, climate-resilient society founded on a circular, zero-carbon economy.
Our mission is to gather all cities that have embarked on this journey with us in 2019 and create the structures for governance with the right institutions in place to achieve this vision by 2030. This can be achieved if we break down silos and build the capacity to work collaboratively.
Read on for a lightly edited extract from BwB’s original blog post exploring how to reduce net energy consumption in the built environment, which contributes 30-40 per cent to a city’s total CO2 emissions.
Read on for a lightly edited extract from BwB’s original blog post describing interesting insights on innovative finance from BwB and other “design partners,” which emerged during their work on EIT Climate-KIC’s Healthy, Clean Cities Deep Demonstration.
Read on for a lightly edited extract from Dark Matter Labs’ original blog post detailing insights gleaned from its collaboration with EIT Climate-KIC’s Healthy, Clean Cities Deep Demonstration, and much more.
EIT Climate-KIC partner Democratic Society has launched its Democratic Climate Model—a model showing how democratic principles can lead cities and regions to respond differently to climate change, heavily informed by work done with EIT Climate-KIC’s Healthy, Clean Cities Deep Demonstration.
Following its Open Call, the New Accelerator programme has assembled a consortium of new and current EIT Climate-KIC partners to foster European entrepreneurship to tackle climate change.
For EIT Climate-KIC, it is of paramount importance to create the links between decision-makers and the public around climate action. Citizen engagement is therefore at the heart of our Deep Demonstrations programme.
A cross- KIC (Knowledge and Innovation Community) initiative is working on bringing data into the Spanish capital’s decarbonisation activities.
EIT Climate-KIC partner The Democratic Society has written an article on taking citizen climate action to the next level, featuring learnings from their work on our Healthy, Clean Cities Deep Demonstration.
EIT Climate-KIC is working with the city of Vienna to identify climate initiatives and to link them systematically to push beyond incremental change.
The 'Eco-fictions' installation is the brainchild of Instituto Mutante de Narrativas Ambientales, an environment-focused arts group - one of four core partners in the Madrid chapter of EIT Climate-KIC’s Deep Demonstration of Healthy Clean Cities, along with Madrid’s City Government, the transport infrastructure operator Ferrovial, and the Technical University of Madrid.
The aim of our ‘Position’ articles are to formulate a clear problem statement and present what have we learnt so far during EIT Climate-KIC’s 10+ years of action in the field of climate action, linking to our projects, initiatives and programmes. In addition, we explore partners and networks who we can engage in order to deliver on our value proposition. ‘Position’ articles are not meant to explain or cover everything that is happening in the world in relation to the identified problem statement.
The aim of our ‘Position’ articles are to formulate a clear problem statement and present what have we learnt so far during EIT Climate-KIC’s 10+ years of action in the field of climate action, linking to our projects, initiatives and programmes. In addition, we explore partners and networks who we can engage in order to deliver on our value proposition. ‘Position’ articles are not meant to explain or cover everything that is happening in the world in relation to the identified problem statement.
Trees as infrastructure: An open source model to support municipalities in transitioning toward resilient urban forest management practices.
Trees as infrastructure: An open source model to support municipalities in transitioning toward resilient urban forest management practices.
While the challenges of climate change and a global health crisis converge in cities, the economic conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic now present an unprecedented moment in modern urban sustainable development.
Over the past year, Dark Matter Labs has been reimagining infrastructures with stakeholders throughout Europe, including the EIT Climate-KIC Healthy, Clean Cities Deep Demonstration.
