Participating cities
In common the participating cities
- face considerable population growth within city boundaries and/or surrounding region,
- are committed to sustainable energy actions plans, smart city strategies or equivalent and want to enhance their operational design, planning and implementation capacity,
- have already started some concrete ambitious urban development projects to learn from.
They are complementary as they
- are at different levels of advancement towards integrative urban energy planning, which allows mutually beneficial sharing of experiences between the more advanced as well as between more and less advanced cities,
- are of different size and different population density and related heat density, with implications on possible central or decentral heating and cooling systems,
- have different instruments and tools in use, which can be shared for mutual benefit,
- have participated in different relevant European projects, whose results they will introduce to the group of cities,
- have different planning traditions with regard to working together across different departments as well as to involvement of stakeholders and citizen participation,
- are either ― statute cities (= regions at the same time) or have planning competences at agglomeration level, which both are interesting characteristics for the planning process,
- are members in different interesting networks, which ensures a large reach-out to other cities.
There is no one-fits-all, no single recipe, but several good ways of meeting the objectives, acknowledging local circumstances such as legal, technical or climatic circumstances. By pooling cities it is possible to search and identify categories and typologies to deduce models for replication in other cities and to thus limit the necessary extra efforts for further cities.