In times when cities and communities are looking to digital solutions to tackle a growing range of interconnected challenges, we must boost these efforts through a ‘European Way’ where digital solutions help to create places where people enjoy living and working.
Digital solutions are broad and include approaches to smart urban mobility, energy efficiency, sustainable housing, digital public services, and civic-led governance. Large-scale uptake and upscale of these solutions are crucial to help our cities and communities meet their climate targets and reduce their environmental footprint, while fostering citizen participation and bringing prosperity to all types of business, including SMEs and start-ups.
Through co-creation with citizens, we aim to bring the economic and social benefits of this transformation to all local communities and implement an inclusive digital Europe, with powerful digital services, technologies, infrastructures and skills.
This group aims to build a community of like-minded cities, working on local digital twins. The group will discuss the concept, bring forward concrete use cases from around the EU and then explore why cities would be interested in using local digital twins.
The beating heart of the urban digital transformation Urban data platforms are at the core of the digital transformation of cities and communities. It is the centrepiece for new and innovative services from a simple route-planner to complex digital twin solution. Urban Data Platforms are the beating hearts of the urban digital transformation as they connect, analyse and visualise all data from the urban fabric. From here, data can be further shared to city services or third-party providers offering seamless mobile experiences for citizens.
Can an Arts & Technology festival add a technological experience to truly innovate culture? That was the starting question of this project. The idea: enable people through Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to share with other visitors their opinion on art works. The advantage: no 'parasitic' use of technology (like with Google or facebook), but an enabling of the visitor who forms an opinion of an art work, decides to share it and then is enabled to actively do that.
Work is underway by cities supported by the European Commission to develop EU standard contractual clauses for the procurement of ethical AI based on the good practices of the City of Amsterdam.
According to data 169 million EU citizens lack even basic digital skills. This accounts for 44% of Europeans between the ages of 16-74. Lack of access to digital services as well as lack of awareness of digital possibilities have major impact on the digital divide, resulting in social divide.
On 9 March, Living-in.EU and Wavestone organised an interactive workshop on the organisational and cultural interoperability challenges that local administrations may face when implementing data spaces and local digital twins.
This is a unique opportunity for every city and region interested in learning more about the level of performance in designing and delivering digital services that focus on their citizens and their needs.
Wavestone is conducting a study on organisational and cultural interoperability issues arising in local administrations when establishing local, regional or national data spaces or local digital twins drawing on examples from European public administrations for the European Commission’s Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology (
Draft Agenda – (TBC) 12:00 - 12:05 Welcome (Living-in.eu Legal subgroup) 12:05 - 12:25 Presenting the Interoperable Europe Act (Isa Katharina von Kalben, Program Manager, DG DIGIT) 12:25 - 12:45 City perspective on the proposal for an Interoperable Europe Act (Helsinki, Eurocities)
The first Mayors’ Digital Assembly of the Living-in.EU movement will be organised on 13 June afternoon, in the framework of the the biggest event for cities this year - the Brussels Urban Summit (BUS) taking place from 12 to 15 June 2023. More information about the BUS can be found here: https://www.urbansummit.brussels/.
We want to collaborate with innovative people and organisations to help develop solutions to our current challenges and create new opportunities for the future. To do this we want to explore new ways of working with others and identify the best ideas and technologies, wherever they may be. If you have one of those ideas, submit them here.
