The area around Umeå in northern Sweden is almost completely covered in dirt and mud. Encouraging residents to take public transportation on cold, dark mornings takes some persuading, but the city is more understanding than most about the needs of the people who live there.
After decades of using a gendered lens in its travel surveys, the city knew that if everyone traveled like women, it would have reached its sustainable transportation goal for 2050.
A bus stop was built using individual wooden pods to help women feel safer in public places.
“It started a big discussion in Umeå,” project manager Carina Aschan says of the Station of Being, which uses distinctive sounds and colored lights to announce the coming electric buses.
“It was meant to be an energy solution but it also turned out to be a social solution, and sparked a much broader discussion about the innovation of Umeå, and whether a city should do that.”
Dozens of smart solutions have been launched under an EU-funded project called RUGGEDISED, which aims to decarbonize three cities and encourage many more. As it comes to an end after six years, the question is what can our cities do for us, strength smart, became more urgent than before.
Here are some of the brightest finds from the ‘lighthouse’ towns of Umeå, Rotterdam and Glasgow.
What are smart cities?
Smart cities seems futuristic but is built on some simple ideas around the digitization of our transportation, buildings and other infrastructure. One way to think about smart solutions is to work better with what’s already there.
At the Heart of South experimental site in Rotterdam, the heat of the sewage water (which reaches up to 19C) is recovered through a heat exchanger and stored in the thermal grid. Nearby, pipes are placed under the pavement to capture its heat (concrete hits 65C in summer). In the winter, it pumps hot water instead of cold to thaw the frozen driveway.
Nothing is obvious about this innovation, hidden underground and behind the city’s Ahoy convention center.
But it’s about results, and Ahoy has been fossil-free since 2019. A carpet of thousands of solar panels on its roof provides the massive energy needed for large light shows, such as Eurovision 2021.
Transforming Rotterdam into a smart city
“My dream is that the built environment is connected to sustainable energy sources,” Katelien van den Berge, RUGGEDISED project manager in Rotterdam, told Euronews Green.
the Netherlands‘ the second city was destroyed by German bombers during the second world war, so its eclectic architecture has recent roots.
“We have an advantage because we have a wide public area,” explains van den Berge, which facilitates the weaving of smarter infrastructure under the streets and within the city.
“The reconstruction of Rotterdam after the Second World War, we had an empty inner city, it was all leveled and they built a district heating system” he said. “Ownership has changed and sources have changed, but the system is in place, to make it easier to expand.” About 11 thousand homes have been connected.
How smart solutions can reduce energy demand
Knowing more about the way energy flows in our cities will also enable us to be more efficient in our use of it. Umeå’s most effective solution is better demand management, Aschan said.
An intelligent set of sensors has been installed in university buildings, collecting data on human presence, temperature, light and CO2 levels. A smarter heating and cooling system subsequently achieved a 23 percent drop in peak-time energy use across the campus.
The city’s university borders its hospital, and RUGGEDISED has sparked a conversation between the two. Instead of building a new wing, the hospital found it could use some of the university’s empty nighttime facilities. It may be simple but it uses what one already has wiser The method is required in most cases.
Smarter ways to use energy at home
The main place many city dwellers need to save energy this winter is at home.
That is not equally true across the continent. In Sweden, tenants have the right to a warm home and there is no phrase for ‘fuel poverty‘ (or hot banks). In the UK – though Prime Minister Truss frozen bills at an average of €2,890 a year – 7 million households are still on course to spend more than 10 percent of their income on fuel.
To ease the burden on some of the poorest residents, Glasgow City Council has partnered with Wheatley, Scotland’s largest social housing group. By RUGGEDISED, new devices are installed tenants‘ electric storage heating systems, giving them greater control over the temperature of their flats.
People use almost 20 percent less voltaic as a result, explains Wheatley carbon reduction and sustainability manager Colin Reid.
“It allows us to interact with households, it offers them for the first time the ability to control the heating of their own home when before they were the only receiver,” he said.
“It’s good practice for people that they can see for themselves how to operate their home.”
Smart street in Glasgow
It is often said that people do Glasgow and ‘people making Glasgow greener’ became another call to action.
“It’s part of the character of the city,” said Reid. “It has issues and there is a legacy of industrialisation, but overall Glasgow is a warm place. People want community with each other, so that’s a real asset to every start of a just a transition.”
Running through the heart of the city – along George Street and Duke Street – is Glasgow’s flagship solution: it’s a smart street.
Here the council is testing various measures, including lighting that is triggered when people walk past, a new solar canopy on the roof of the car park to charge. EVs more power savingand district heating.
When world leaders descend on your city for COP SEARCHED, decision-makers are likely to take more notice, says Gavin Slater, head of sustainability at Glasgow City Council. Still, “the city is a fundamentally better place” because of its involvement with RUGGEDISED, he said.
Glasgow has made great progress towards the net-zero by 2030 goal, Slater revealed. Carbon emissions have been cut by 50 percent since 2006.
Digital twin: How far can data modeling help cities become greener?
Data is rapidly changing how we see our homes and streets, from a energy saving point of view. Where there used to be one data point a year – someone is coming to check yours gas and electricity – our homes are now a house of numbers, says Dr Marcel van Oosterhout from the Erasmus Center for Data Analytics.
Public concern over how this data will be used has, understandably, dampened its potential. The risk comes from how detailed a picture can fall into the wrong hands. Data about energy use can be combined with addresses, giving a clear indication of when people are on vacation.
But representatives from all three cities spoke in glowing terms about what ‘digital twins’ could do for sustainable planning. These are smart 3D models of the city that combine real-time data on how it works, explains Roland van der Heijden, program manager for Digital City Rotterdam.
They allow residents to be brought into the planning process as well. On the site of a new square, people can scan a QR code to create and judge designs, then use augmented reality to see how they might look.
Generic, scalable, maintainable data sources are key, added van der Heijden. And here the private sector may play a major role. Google draws on vast reserves of data to build its environmental insights explorer (EIE) tool, raising transportation emissions, air quality and tree canopies.
Anna Williams, a solution lead on the Geo team at the tech giant, insists that “helping cities lower their emissions is our north star.”
What are the limits of smart cities?
“There is no cookie cutter copy” in building smart cities, said Adriaan Slob, an expert at the Dutch research organization TNO that helps cities in their sustainable transition.
A major challenge is that these intelligent solutions must be implemented in existing urban areas, which have their own chaotic webs.
In the Heart of South, Katelien van den Berge’s team can’t get their wits about them electric grid from the ground. Although it has all the elements of smart lighting, electric vehicles and charging points, the city did not get the experimental status needed to connect them, and a key contract bid for energy partner Eneco was awarded elsewhere.
“There is no coordination between the tender at a city scale and implementation at the project level,” van den Berge showed. And without an overall owner, no one is responsible for the success of the grid. Never mind in a city as chaotic as Rotterdam; the group brought their learnings to many other major areas of urban development.
Where ambition has outgrown itself, RUGGEDISED still provides some unique blueprints. But it is clear that smarter connections are needed at a higher, legislative level as well.
As for energy crisis general life of the citizen – in Glasgow and Rotterdam at least – van den Berge believes that “there is a way to climb. I think this winter will be the lowest, and then we will start working on how to deal with it .”
