SimpliCITY
The project aims to support cities (Salzburg, Uppsala, 5 Follower Cities) through technology-based participation and incentive methods, a toolkit, and a digital marketplace to make better use of innovative, regional, sustainable services, and thus ensure sustainable development of cities (smart city initiatives).
In the past decades, European cities and their scientific institutions have set ambitious goals in cutting greenhouse emissions and enabling low carbon transition. A range of regional sustainability services (RSS) have already been developed and tested, but still lack an active user base. For urban policy makers, regulation or economic instruments have reached their limits, while users are overwhelmed by information and usually stick to old behaviours.
SimpliCity contributes to the cities’ challenges of creating, sustainable and economically viable urban areas by empowering smart city managers, communities and end-users with:
- a technology-enhanced participation and incentivisation method and tool-kit,
- a digital marketplace, aggregating innovative regional sustainability services (RSS) and offering intelligent incentivisation functionalities, and,
- the establishment of a transnational “smart city learning network”, specifically exchanging methods and lead-user experiences on innovation scaling activities.
The hybrid SimpliCITY approach aims to boost the digital competences of the urban communities in Salzburg, Uppsala and five follower-cities for living a “Sustainable Lifestyle”. For their support, the project will co-creatively develop, test and provide the proof-of concept for an innovative online marketplace (web platform), which intelligently aggregates regional sustainability services and by means of behavioural changing and gamifying features helps to engage citizens in scaling up bike-mobility services, local bio-production & consumption and digital integration services. The project will investigate and showcase how skills and tools for exploiting digital sustainability innovation will become a daily routine of citizens.
SimpliCITY will ensure that cities achieve a successful transformation towards Smart Sustainable Cities by closing the gap between citizens, civil society actors, companies, and policy. Within the project duration we will aggregate 20 of the most highly ranked sustainability services in town from scientific and municipalities, involve 60 business partners for incentivisation and reach the early innovation majority of active users (approx. 34% inhabitants of a city and urban areas ref.Rogers`Innovation theory; approx. 50.000 users).
The project consortium comprises experienced actors across the digital innovation value chain with links to related European initiatives fostering in the smart city movement. The established advisory board will ensure that the partners will exchange and share lessons learned with the European smart city community. The five follower cities will be able to replicate the project while the platform will be exploited as a support-service for cities, consumers and producers in reaching long-term sustainability and impact goals.The methods and tools will be disseminated within this European smart city community and jointly, the project initiates activities to reach the late innovators majority (also 34%).
