JPI Urban Europe joined the World Urban Forum 2020 exhibition and hosted a well-visited session on smart cities. Organized and convened by UN-Habitat, the World Urban Forum (WUF) has become the foremost international gathering for sustainable urbanization. This year’s theme “Cities of Opportunities: Connecting Culture and Innovation” attracted 13 000 participants from 168 countries. The forum presented a set of Declared Actions by participants representing academia, local governments, businesses and NGOs. 

Session: From smart city projects to sustainable urban futures

The JPI Urban Europe session at WUF 10 offered good practices and learnings from 15 transnational and transdisciplinary research- and innovation projects on Smart Cities and Communities which JPI Urban Europe funded with the support of the European Commission in the ERA-NET Cofund Smart Cities and Communities (ENSCC) call. In these projects, actors from academia, the business sector, the general public and city officials have innovated ways to tackle the urban issues of behavioural change and culture related to energy consumption, ecological footprints, socio-technical integration, transportation, and more. What was fruitful in their process and how did they make their local partnerships work in practice? How can their results be used to improve more sustainable ways of living in urban areas? Participants discussed how the results of the ENSCC call can support capacity building for achieving Agenda 2030’s Sustainable Development Goals.

By synthesizing the outcomes from the ENSCC call, the session demonstrated how smart systems and frontier technologies together with issues of habits, morals and behaviours on individual and governance level, can benefit from integration in practice. Aligning with the theme of WUF 10, the session sparked a conversation on how cooperation over cultural diversities (in a broad sense) can benefit the innovation process in urban settings, both for project partners cooperating across national boundaries and in between project partners on a local level. Download the ENSCC leaflet to learn more about the main outcomes of the call.

“After the session JPI Urban Europe welcomed participants to network and discuss in the booth. We learned that this type of session, where good examples of how academia and practitioners have worked in co-creation on urban dilemmas, was an appreciated and needed addition to the conference program”

JPI Urban Europe projects at the World Urban Forum

Participants in the conference could take part of the results from over 80 funded projects when visiting the JPI Urban Europe booth in the exhibition area. Three projects  gained particular attention in the JPI Urban Europe session, held in the Urban Library on February 12. Marc Dijk from ENSCC project SmarterLabs joined the session and shared the key learnings on urban living labs projects in smart city contexts. Mr. Haris Neophytou from project SmartGov who exhibited at the forum via InterFusion Services Ltd, was also present in the session. Frans Melissen and Ko Koens from Smart City Hospitaly project joined the forum in a much appreciated travel-free manner, and participants could enjoy a recored video greeting with the key messages and successes from the project.

Projects at the JPI Urban Europe session:

• SmarterLabs– Improving anticipation and social inclusion in Living Labs
• SmartGov explained in 5 minutes
• Smart City Hospitality– Implementing low carbon social urban tourism solutions and creating citizen empowerment through smart city hospitality 
  

  
  Smart City Hospitality video greeting to #WUF10 participants

> See photos and videos from the forum on our Twitter and Instagram stories.
> Contact Johannes Riegler (Stakeholder Involvement Officer) or Caroline Wrangsten (Assistant Project Manager) who represented JPI Urban Europe at WUF 2020.
> Read the #WUF10 Declared Actions here.