According to the latest studies, around 6.2 billion people will live in urban areas by 2030, representing 70% of global population. This global trend will have a direct impact in our cities that will need to be accompanied by the need for more resources such as energy and water, additional and better buildings and infrastructure, advanced mobility strategies and services for the citizens. It is estimated that cities will generate an annual market of about $2.8 trillion. The 645 biggest cities bill generate alone 50% of the global GDP2.
The main challenge for Europe could be summarized as the capability to adapt European cities and urban ecosystems to a more sustainable, efficient and inclusive societies that can generate growth, jobs and attract investments and tourism. This perspective will integrate all sustainability aspects in a common and long term global objective: to build high quality of life urban spaces for European citizens.
CITyFiED project aims to develop a replicable, systemic and integrated strategy to adapt European cities and urban ecosystems into the smart city of the future, focusing on reducing the energy demand and GHG emissions and increasing the use of renewable energy sources by developing and implementing innovative technologies and methodologies for building renovation, smart grid and district heating networks and their interfaces with ICTs and Mobility. This strategy has the following pillars:
- Large scale demonstrations: three holistic district renovations at Laguna-Valladolid (Spain), Soma (Turkey) and Lund (Sweden), deploying innovative and cost-effective technologies for a high increase of the overall energy efficiency and a relevant reduction of the environmental impact. A deep retrofitting of the buildings, an innovative district heating and cooling concept and a set of solutions to improve the grid management and increase the distributed electricity generation are going to be carried out in order to achieve powerful models suitable for replication across Europe.
- Maximization of the replication potential: organization of a cluster of cities. More than 15 cities have already signed a letter expressing their interest to be part of this cluster.
- Development of innovative and cost effective methodologies and procedures for planning, deploying and replicating energy efficient district retrofitting actions, resulting in low energy and zero emission cities and urban areas, deploying HVAC facilities based on a district scale and also integrating distributed electricity generation.
- Dissemination: It is also foreseen to give a clear message to professionals, academic audiences and the citizens in general, about the benefits of the energy efficiency in the city environment, but also addressing complementary issues such as mobility, in order to modify the user behaviour towards a more sustainable awareness.
The start date of the project is 1st April 2014. Mondragon University will take part in this project together with IK4-Ikerlan, ETIC, LKS coordinated by Mondragon Corporation. More precisely the Telematics and Web Engineering Groups of Mondragon Unibertsitatea take part in the project. CITyFiED consortium is composed by 18 partners across 5 different European countries. Additionally, 18 cities and 1 network of cities from 5 countries have already been involved by means of a signed letter of interest.