STARDUST Newsletter #4

Dear Reader,

I hope you and your beloved ones stay healthy and safe during these very difficult times!

STARDUST has also been impacted by the COVID19 pandemic as some activities have slowed down or have been postponed. Despite this, we still managed to make great progresses over the past months on our mission to enlighten European cities.

One example? The workshop in Pamplona presented the results of the first edition of the Smart Iruña Lab programme, such as the five smart city project proposals from local start-ups which were tested in Pamplona itself. These projects covered a wide range of activities, from radar solutions for traffic monitoring to technologies for a healthy indoor environment in public buildings and water saving for irrigation.

Another example comes for Tampere, where a deep study based on digital twin concept will optimize the synergies among the energy demands (heating, cooling and electricity) of Hatanpäänvaltie 30 business center and the data center located inside the building. The building has been already connected to local district heating and cooling, which harvests the cold from the bottom of the nearby Näsijärvi lake. Over the next months, machine learning algorithms will help on optimizing the energy flows and the maintenance works.

Speaking of Tampere, right before the outbreak of the pandemic we organised in our Finnish Lighthouse city the workshop “Success Stories and Development Challenges of Carbon Neutral and Energy-efficient Mobility, Building and Energy from Finnish Lighthouse Projects”. This was done in collaboration with our fellow Smart City Projects IRIS, MAKING-CITY, MatchUP and mySMARTLife. The event gathered more than 50 participants, who developed ideas and brainstormed on how to best replicate smart city solutions and overcome legal and market barriers. Representatives from Finnish smart cities recounted their experiences on developing low carbon solutions for energy, buildings and mobility. Find out more on our website, where you can watch our video interviews with some key participants.

Of course, the workshop in Tampere was not the only recent collaboration within the network of EU SCC01 projects. In particular, given the exceptional times we have experienced in the past months, I would like to mention the #SmartCitiesHelp and #CityFromMyWindow social media campaigns. The former aimed to make the brightest solutions offered by EU smart cities to cope with the COVID19 emergency easily available to citizens. The latter invited citizens to share pictures of their cities taken from home during the lockdown: a way to feel closer to each other despite social distancing.

But at this point I am sure you’d like to dive into the latest news from STARDUST. So I’ll leave you to it and not take up any more of your time by wishing you a stellar reading!