Page 34 - European Energy Innovation - Summer 2016 publication

34 Summer 2016 European Energy Innovation
SMART CITIES
CITYkeys: Measurement matters
By Nikolaos Kontinakis, CITYkeys project coordinator, EUROCITIES
For any urban community, taking
the digital leap and going
green is never an easy feat. The
success of a ‘smart city’ project role is to help identify project partners’ to become a lighthouse city. However,
hinges on good and solid preparation,
and its execution, or evaluation of
its success, must be preceded by
meticulous measurements.
Enter CITYkeys. The aim of this two-year
project, launched in February 2015 and
funded by the European Commission’s
Horizon 2020 programme, is to
develop, and eventually validate, a
‘bottom-up performance measurement
framework’ for monitoring and
comparing the implementation of
smart urban technologies. The strategic
goal of CITYkeys is to accelerate the
transition to low-carbon, resource-
efficient cities. The method and the
indicators that have been developed
are to be used to evaluate smart city
projects and to facilitate the replication
of the successful ones in different
contexts.
CITYkeys brings together the municipal
authorities of Rotterdam, Tampere,
Vienna, Zagreb and Zaragoza, as well as
the research institutes VTT (coordinator,
Finland), AIT (Austria), and TNO
(Netherlands) – and EUROCITIES. Our
needs and gather their feedback on
the tools being developed. Additional
cities have been invited to contribute
in order to gather as much evidence
and feedback as possible about the
practical use, benefits and challenges
of key performance indicators (KPIs)
and smart city project evaluation
frameworks.
TWOFOLD APPROACH
At the dawn of the smart city era, the
European Commission decided to take
a twofold approach to the development
and promotion of such solutions. Within
the framework of the more recent
Smart Cities and Communities call for
proposals, it opted for the creation of
so-called ‘lighthouse’ projects, each
with two or three ‘lead’ cities and a few
‘follower’ cities. Under this scheme, the
lead cities or communities team up as
‘lighthouses’ to demonstrate the use
of a mix of innovative technologies in
specific cities and urban communities
and to provide models for numerous
follow-up projects. Follower cities
are defined as cities that have not yet
acquired the full technical competence
they need to be fully involved in the
project from the beginning and have
enough committed resources to deliver
a replication plan of most (if not all) the
solutions developed within the project.
The Commission also identified
‘horizontal activities’, which aim to
support the ‘lighthouse’ projects by
addressing cross-cutting challenges,
such as regulatory barriers or
standardisation issues. With its focus on
performance monitoring, CITYkeys falls
into the latter category.
At the outset of the project, the
CITYkeys partners and EUROCITIES
members were invited to complete
two separate surveys. The aim was to
assess the actual needs of the cities
and their stakeholders regarding a
performance measurement system.
A total of 19 large cities from across
Europe responded to the first survey,
while around 50 stakeholders provided
input on their relevant needs and
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