CLIMABOROUGH

Inspiration

Climaborough is a direct descendant of Designscapes, which focused on applying design tools and methods to innovation processes in, by and for cities. Climaborough decides to go beyond Designscapes goals and has the ambition to bridge the gap between design and implementation of urban innovations, particularly in the face of climatic change and its consequential needs for adaptation and mitigation. The biggest hurdle to climate transition is not the availability of fitting solutions, but rather the capacity to implement them.

There are many bottlenecks in the transition from prototyping to testing of innovation and from successful testing to market deployment. Numerous results of climate projects are therefore never widespread and often disappear at the end of a project, leading to numerous solutions locally re-inventing the wheel of similar projects in other countries or cities.

Climaborough tackles the question whether and to which extent urban planning can and should be transformed in its current approach to spatial design and spreading of human activities, in order to break the silos that impede or slow down the transition of European Cities towards a new ecological and digital order.

Innovation

Climaborough is an Innovation project designed to field test the ClimHub, Climate Sandbox and Climate Service concepts within 12 European Cities engaged (+2 observers) in their ecological and digital transition. The project aims to enhance traditional urban and spatial planning approaches through data and knowledge based decision making, including climate services co-production for transitions, cross-city and cross-country pilot co-creation as well as the tactical use of public procurement of innovative solutions.

LIST will support Climaborough in the development of the open source Climaborough Data Platform. Together with the Daten-Kompetenzzentrum Städte und Regionen (DKSR) and the Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT), a data collection, monitoring and evaluation platform will be developed to both measure the KPIs of solution providers, but also connect the data to a climate neutrality monitoring tool. LIST will primarily focus on creating a modelling language for KPI and climate data visualization. For that purpose, tools from the BESSER project will be used and extended. The resulting modelling language will allow for an easy collaboration between developers and cities to define relevant data and corresponding visualizations with the addition of smart components to enhance the final product.

Impact

Climaborough has multiple key objectives, supported by a combination of deliverables. First of all, a scheme to support cities to define a business model with startups and established companies to improve the scalability of climate friendly solutions will be developed. Furthermore, a participatory model will be produced to support the ongoing formation of a community of cities and related stakeholders (citizens, companies, SMEs, associations…) to ensure uptake, endurance, and expansion. Finally, a climate neutrality monitoring tool on the integration of existing solutions will be developed, making use of the Climaborough data platform and enhanced through the usage of advanced technologies (AI, Advanced Analytics, Digital Twins).

All these objectives ultimately aim to close the gaps between cities and services, between cities and start-ups, between cities and the investment community, and between cities and their stakeholders. "MORE OF THE SAME IS NOT ENOUGH" is the principle CLIMABOROUGH adopts as a basis to make evident that the Climate Neutrality Mission implementation will be less effective unless synergized and integrated with other actions to produce a sounder impact on urban climate.