Projects about Smart cities

Vehicle safety used to be measured in seatbelts and airbags. The emergence of highly networked vehicles means updating our safety parameters, and the SAFERtec project is showing us how.

Supported by Barcelona City Council, Decidim is an open source digital platform dedicated to participatory democracy, entirely designed and built in a collaborative manner. Since its inception, the platform has been implemented by several cities, regions and organisations worldwide.

The 230 households, farms and small businesses spread out over 44 square kilometres in the remote municipality of Hammikeln, in the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia, felt a great need for high-speed connectivity in order to continue to live and work in the area. The low population density, however, meant that there was no commercial interest from private telecom companies. As a result, the area’s four local communities decided to build their own gigabit-speed fibre network themselves, in partnership with a local utility company.

The Sarantaporo.gr project began when a small group of young people, from the remote Thessaly mountains in central Greece, returned home to realise that their village still had no internet access. Telecom companies had no interest in investing to bring the necessary infrastructure there, so the group set out to create a wireless community network for almost 3,500 people in 12 isolated mountain villages. To stimulate demand and uptake, the project’s volunteers provide training and support. The €156,000 project was 59% EU-funded and won a European Broadband Award in 2019.

In rural communities in Lower Austria, where telecom companies had not invested for 15 years, the State took action, creating a company dedicated to bringing broadband access to over 450,000 people. Vice President of the nöGIG company, Igor Brusic, explained: “Without broadband, the inhabitants and companies are forced to move from these rural areas to urban ones. Investing or building up a financial structure and attracting capital for rural areas is something that makes this project unique”. This project was a finalist in the 2019 European Broadband Awards.

In the German state of Baden-Württemberg, the District of Calw is a rural region encompassing 25 towns over 800 km2 of hills and valleys in the Black Forest. The challenging terrain makes the deployment of broadband cables both complicated and expensive. Many areas in the region are underserved as a result. In 2017, the District began a broadband initiative to connect its 25 communities with a 386 km Next Generation Access (NGA) backbone network, as well as mobile coverage via masts. Both federally and regionally funded, the project reduced costs by re-using existing infrastructure.

The Latvian State Radio and Television Centre obtained EU funding in order to bring broadband connectivity to rural areas in Latvia where there was no commercial interest in investing. A passive middle mile backbone network was built, bringing fibre access to a total of 150,000 properties. The project was 85% funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and was a finalist in the 2018 European Broadband Awards.

In the rural Bavarian municipality of Senden, in Germany, citizens formed a cooperative in order to create and invest in their own high-speed broadband network. By teaming up with the local administration and securing investment from telecommunications company Deutsche Glasfaser, they brought 1 Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) connectivity to over 650 homes and farmsteads. The project revitalised business in the area and helped retain its population.

In the rural Croatian community of Drnje, the community council decided to co-finance the creation of a Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network in order to bring over 100 Mbps connectivity to local businesses, citizens and public entities. This co-financing enabled the transformation of the original plan for broadband development in the area, in which a local Internet Service Provider had intended to build a wireless network offering maximum speeds of only 30 Mbps. The local mayor made this decision because high-speed broadband is essential for encouraging young people to build their lives there.

Cutting-edge software technology developed by the European project CLASS is now being tested on connected cars in the Modena Automotive Smart Area (MASA), a real urban laboratory in northern Italy. The CLASS framework is powering compelling smart city applications, from digital traffic signs and smart parking to air pollution simulation and pedestrian avoidance applications.