We talk a lot about knowledge-sharing and cross-border collaboration, but few of our projects demonstrate the value of this at an international scale better than the EU-funded Sharing Cities initiative, which brought together project teams across London, Milan, Lisbon, Burgas, Warsaw and Bordeaux. As the programme ends, Head of Strategy and Operations, Heather Yedigaroff reflects on its value and the relationships that it forged - and which continue, as its legacy.

Here at DG Cities, we’re all about collaboration. Our strength as an organisation comes from our multi-disciplinary team considering innovation from different perspectives and working together to solve problems. We see collaboration as being so fundamental to our success as a company that we have set it as one of our core company values, the behaviours and skills that we value in our colleagues.

Of course, we love collaborating with other organisations too. Some of the most exciting and far reaching projects we’ve done at DG Cities have been partnership projects where we’ve worked with companies and academia and brought all of our collective brainpower together to do something new and innovative. Some stand-out memories for me were working with Magtec and Veolia on how to develop the UK’s first electric refuse collection vehicle, and the time we worked with TRL, Cisco, Loughborough University and Cubic to develop the Smart Mobility Living Lab in Greenwich, the UK’s most advanced real-world test environment for future mobility. Neither of these projects would have been possible for one partner to deliver alone. It was only through our collaboration and sharing of knowledge and expertise that we were able to deliver those projects successfully.

Sharing Cities: 2016-2022

Over the past six years, another initiative we have been quietly involved in is the Sharing Cities project, an EU Horizon 2020-funded programme. This was a Greater London Authority-led collaboration of 30 different partners focused on six European cities: London, Milan, Lisbon, Burgas, Warsaw and Bordeaux. London, Milan and Lisbon acted as ‘lighthouse cities’ and worked together to develop and implement replicable urban digital solutions and collaborative models. The ‘fellow’ cities, Bordeaux, Burgas, and Warsaw, then sought to replicate the solutions in their own areas. Within London, the Royal Borough of Greenwich was the official London demonstrator area and DG Cities has supported the Council to deliver on the project’s ambitious transport and energy related goals.  

The project officially kicked off on 1st January 2016 and over the last six years we’ve had the opportunity to work alongside and learn from our colleagues in the other cities. The project implemented 10 different measures and the beauty of the programme was that whilst the cities were  united by the common goal of finding new ways to improve outcomes for their residents, they each had different starting points and constraints, and tailored the delivery of the measures according to local circumstances.

Milan, for example, has excelled in building retrofit. It set itself ambitious goals and delivered first-of-its-kind building retrofits to 20 multi-property buildings. In a multi property building,  there is no one single building owner to oversee the building design and decision-making process. To overcome this, Milan developed a participatory and co-design approach that will have widespread application across all cities in Europe. 

When the project began, Lisbon already had impressive shared mobility services, such as a shared bike scheme and car clubs, but through the project, the city has hugely improved and expanded those existing services. One of Lisbon’s challenges is its hills, so to combat that, Lisbon has expanded its bike sharing services to include large numbers of e-bikes. The ebikes proved so popular that Lisbon is now pressing ahead and extending their trial across the city and into the suburbs, with 1,500 e-bikes and a network of new cycling infrastructure. Lisbon also uses a real-time, incentive-based system that generates offers for users to move bikes from overcrowded docking stations to meet demand forecasted in other locations. The e-bike scheme generated over 3 million trips by 16,000 users. It led to a 38% modal shift from the bus and 16% from cars. A massive 26% of users use the scheme daily. Lisbon also now has 160 electric vehicles in its public car-sharing scheme. The service uses a keyless sharing app that allows members of the public to access the vehicles. The vehicles are monitored via GPS and managed through a smart fleet management platform

In Greenwich, we have installed a highly innovative water-source heating system, which will warm 95 homes at the Ernest Dence Estate. This is part of a wider scheme at the Estate, which has included building repairs and redecoration, window repairs, loft insulation, new low-energy LED lighting and smart devices. Renewing the heating and hot water system using a water-source heat pump will provide a more efficient heating system, producing less carbon emissions, improving local air quality and delivering 5,309 tonnes of CO2e savings over 25 years – the equivalent of growing around 87,000 trees. Greenwich also had the Greenwich Energy Hero initiative - a ‘demand-side response’ trial in which participating households were incentivised to reduce their electricity at times of high demand on the electricity grid. Participants that used less electricity during a ‘peak response alert’ earned rewards that could be turned into a donation to a local charity, or a shopping voucher for personal use. The Greenwich Energy Hero app also showed their live electricity usage information, historic usage charts and energy saving tips and advice. This earned Greenwich a Harvard 2020 Innovation Award in Citizen Engagement. 

In Greenwich, we also looked  at electrification and developed an Electric Vehicle Strategy for the borough, which sets out how the Borough will use its position as an accelerator of EV infrastructure deployment to enable every resident and business to use electric vehicles by 2030. We also worked with the borough’s fleet department on a study looking at how to electrify the 550 vehicles in the borough’s vehicle fleet.

As important as these initiatives were the concepts of sharing and replication. Partners continually shared information on their barriers and progress with initiatives. There was also a workstream focused on how to ensure the measures could be replicated in other cities; toolkits and other resources were developed and 100 cities across Europe engaged with the project. 

It was a privilege to have been involved in a project with such a large impact and to have had the opportunity to learn from and work alongside such amazing  partners. It’s fair to say there were a few misty eyes at the recent final project meeting with the EU, but of course the relationships we all developed will continue far beyond the project. We’re already looking for the next opportunity to work together and continue what we’ve started.