SolarShare is Singapore’ s first peer to peer (P2P) energy trading platform. It is a pilot project that allows consumers to purchase renewable electricity produced by private solar panel owners, via an online marketplace from across the city. Prosumers with solar panels installed on their rooftops can sell their excess green energy. Consumers can use SolarShare to convert to green energy at competitive prices, supporting their local community.
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Intelligent Cities – Smart Cities – Innovation Ecosystems
The EU-funded project “ThinkNature” created a multi-stakeholder communication platform to support the understanding and promotion of Nature-based solutions (NBS) at local, regional, EU and international levels. The platform is an integrated web-based solution that stimulates dialogue and interaction on NBS through discussion forums and debates. The project is led by the Technical University of Crete and executed by a consortium of 17 partners originating from 8 countries across Europe.
Building on the experience of more than one hundred innovation strategies for smart specialisation, this book uncovers insights into their recent implementation by regional and national governments in the European Union. The authors provide new reflections on the conceptual approaches for the identification of innovation priorities, the data required, the methods with which to turn data into useful information, and the mapping of the information available. Although designed to boost the competitiveness of Europe and its regions, chapters analyse why the implementation of this policy model was much more complicated than expected.
The paper “Smart Specialisation 2.0: Driving Public Funds Towards Platforms and Ecosystems’ by Christina Kakderi, Nicos Komninos, Anastasia Panori and Artemis Psaltoglou, negotiates two main questions of the methodology of Entrepreneurial Discovery Process (EDP) in Smart Specialisation. The authors question EDP in terms of the granularity level of detail in the analysis and the assessment of dynamism of economic activities, and the collective nature of interventions and investments developed through it. They analyse existing literature and a case study in the context of Greece, as regions have to initiate a stage 2.0 of smart specialisation focusing more on interregional cooperation and good governance. The research is part of the TREnD project (Transition with Resilience for Evolutionary Development).
The Participatory Incremental Urban Planning (PIUP) Toolbox by UN-Habitat is a step-by-step methodology to assess, design, operationalize and implement urban planning processes. A roadmap is proposed to facilitate the understanding and the accomplishment of all the steps.
According to the author, the 2020 collapse of the global economy due to Covid-19 pandemic has enabled us to think about long term trends and what the future could hold for our cities and regions, especially due to the climate agenda. Having as a starting point the current pandemic, this paper sets out the historical precedents for economic transitions after collapses that unleash new technologically based innovation waves. These are shown to be associated with different energy and infrastructure priorities and their transport and resulting urban forms.
REFLOW is an EU H2020 project, from 2019 to 2022, that seeks to understand and transform urban material flows and to co-create and test circular and regenerative solutions in urban and peri-urban areas across Europe. The vision of REFLOW is to develop circular and regenerative cities through the re-localisation of production and the reconfiguration of material flows at different scales, leveraging Fab Labs and makerspaces as catalysts for wide-scale collaboration and co-creation conducive to systemic, sustainable change. The project operates at the international level, mobilising existing networks and movements that are working towards a new productive model for cities such as Circular Cities, C40 Cities and Fab City Global Initiative.