Sharing Cities has four key objectives. 1) To achieve scale in the European smart cities market by proving that properly designed smart city solutions, based around common needs, can be integrated in complex urban environments. This will be done in a way that exhibits their true potential and allows for the significant scale-up and consequent increase in social, economic and environmental value. 2) Adopt a digital first approach which proves the extent to which ICT integration can improve and connect up existing infrastructure, as well as the design and running of new city infrastructure. This will also allow for the creation of a new set of next stage digital services which will help citizens make better and beneficial choices around energy efficiency and mobility, which when scaled up will enhance the city’s ability to hit key targets for mobility, housing, energy efficiency and resilience, and economic development. 3) Accelerate the market to understand, develop and trial business, investment and governance models, essential for the true aggregation and replication (through collaboration) of smart city solutions in cities of different sizes and maturities. In doing this, we intend to accelerate the pace by which we make transformative improvements, and enhance sustainability in communities. 4) Share and collaborate for society: to respond to increasing demand for participation; to enhance mechanisms for citizens’ engagement; to improve local governments capacity for policy making and service delivery through collaboration and co-design; resulting in outcomes that are better for citizens, businesses and visitors. These will be delivered by a range of expert partners across 8 work packages.

RESCCUE aims to deliver a framework enabling city resilience assessment, planning and management by integrating into software tools new knowledge related to the detailed water-centred modelling of strategic urban services performance into a comprehensive resilience platform. These tools will assess urban resilience from a multisectorial approach, for current and future climate change scenarios and including multiple hazards. The project will review and integrate in the general framework existing options to assess climate change impacts and urban systems vulnerabilities allowing to assess multisectorial dependencies under multiple climate change scenarios. An adaptation strategies portfolio, including climate services, ecosystem-based approaches and resource efficiency measures will be incorporated as key components of the deployment strategy. The possible approaches will be ranked by their cost-efficiency in terms of CAPEX and OPEX to evaluate their benefits potential. This will enable city managers and urban system operators deciding the optimal investments to cope with future situations. The validation platform is formed by 3 EU cities (Barcelona, Lisboa and Bristol) that will allow testing the innovative tools developed in the project and disseminating their results among other cities belonging to major international networks. In terms of market potential, RESCCUE will generate large potential benefits, in terms of avoided costs during and after emergencies, that will contribute to their large-scale deployment. The structure of the consortium will guarantee the market uptake of the results, as the complete value chain needed is already represented. The project is coordinated by Aquatec, a large consultancy firm part of a multinational company focused on securing and recovering resources, and includes partners from the research domain, operation of critical urban systems, city managers and international organisations devoted to urban resilience.