Initially, European projects were a just an instrument to finance universities and research centers. For several years now, the Commission used them to stimulate investment in research and it has set a total expenditure target of 3% of GDP. This approach also implies greater participation of the public sector and local authorities.
The funding programs began to include calls for proposals targeted to cities during the 2006 - 2013 seven-year term. These calls mainly proposed "pilot" projects funded at 50%.
The results were not really satisfactory, so in the next cycle (2013-2020) the calls became more and more ambitious and the funding reached 100%, giving an increase in budgets.
The results are improving, thanks to the growing need (of cities) for external funding and the race for the Smart City. Cities are interested in funding, and find it useful to be able to test solutions, but, above all, they want to collaborate with researchers who have skills that their collaborators lack.
In addition, researchers have a field to test their innovation.
The measures taken therefore obtain convincing results. Many large cities are participating in projects, such as Milan, Florence, Paris, Lyon, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Manchester, Porto or Athens, but also smaller cities such as Issy-les-Moulineaux, Ghent and Prato.
However, some problems remain, due to the fact that cities have very different timing (and pressures) from research. They have to move fast and report it to their people, who normally don't shine for their empathy and patience. In addition, these projects still have very rigid rules, also inherited from the world of research, which makes them time-consuming and therefore difficult for a city (and its ecosystem) to follow.
A last major problem remains communication, the Commission cannot reach the local level and, too often, projects fail to communicate their results to the population.
Credits: © Auguste Lange - Fotolia.com
This section aims to collect European projects presented by cities to tell about their experiences and the impact on our daily lives.
The first testimony will be from Paolo Boscolo, director of IT systems at the city of Prato, 190,000 inhabitants a few kilometers from Florence, and IT manager of the NGO Major Cities of Europe, which has been following the city's pilot projects since twenty years. In this testimony, Paolo Boscolo illustrates Datavaults, a project that aims to help citizens become "masters" of their data.
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