Changes in rural areas, such as depopulation, land abandonment and the loss of biodiversity, may proceed very slowly yet are often irreversible. Policymakers can steer these developments in order to reduce their negative impacts but this requires knowing whether current policy instruments are effective, who is benefiting from them and in what measure, what driving forces will be most influential and how they will affect people, planet, profits and land-use. To be truly useful, this knowledge must transcend siloed thinking and be the corollary of a joint effort uniting different actors under a common cause. PoliRur will provide this knowledge by combining several key activities needed to design effective place-based, human-centric and forward-looking rural policies. These include actionable research that takes place within an inclusive learning environment where rural populations, researchers and policymakers come together to address common problems; an evaluation exercise that uses text mining to assess the perceived effectiveness of past or planned policy interventions; and a foresight study that tries to glean the development trajectory of agriculture and its allied sectors until 2040 using several scenarios in which the evolution of rural populations occupies a central place. As a result of these activities, PoliRur will leave decision makers at different levels of government better equipped to tackle existing and emerging rural challenges, rural populations more empowered and rural areas more resilient.

Internet of Everything is recognised to be one of the dominant ways transforming the way we manage and live in our urban environments in the future. The extension of the Internet to the physical spaces and objects is a massive opportunity for new services and business for example in the areas of logistics, transport, environment, security and wellbeing. Internet of everything is directly linked to the smart city development, but it has proceeded slower than expected. The key showstoppers are the lack of common standards, fragmented marketplace, and lack of ways to systematically test and introduce new solutions in the cities. The common challenge of the SELECT for Cities PCP is the design, research and development of “cities as linked and large-scale Internet of Everything labs”. The challenge lies in developing an open, standardized, data-driven, service-oriented and user-centric platform that enables large-scale co-creation, testing and validation of urban IoE applications and services. This approach fosters the longer-term goal of evidence-based innovation in cities. The envisaged platform has several requirements, components & features that are currently not available in existing solutions. The platform must allow collaboration between departments and cities, and (automated) testing of IoE services. The design should be based on an open and modular approach, and support cloud-based, data-driven, service-oriented, user-centric, and co-created large-scale testing. The joint effort of the partners procuring this pre-commercial track lies in guarding the integration capabilities of the platform with solutions that exist in the respective cities today. Particular attention will thus need to be paid to technologies and tools that allow smooth communication and integration between these existing solutions. The end goal of SELECT for Cities is taking the idea of the city as a large Internet of Everything Lab and putting it into practice.

PoliVisu is a Research and Innovation project designed to evolve the traditional public policy making cycle using big data. The aim is to enhance an open set of digital tools to leverage data to help public sector decision-making become more democratic by (a) experimenting with different policy options through impact visualisation and (b) using the resulting visualisations to engage and harness the collective intelligence of policy stakeholders for collaborative solution development. Working with three cities to address societal problems linked to smart mobility and urban planning, the intention is to enable public administrations to respond to urban challenges by enriching the policy making process with opportunities for policy experimentation at three different steps of the policy cycle (policy design, policy implementation, and policy evaluation). Experimentation of policy options will enable the cities to tackle complex, systemic policy problems that require innovative thinking to develop transformative solutions.

DUET is an Innovation project designed to leverage the advanced capabilities of cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) to evolve the traditional public policy making cycle using large open data sources. The aim is to help public sector decision-making become more democratic and effective, both in the short and long term, through the development and use of Digital Twins for policy impact exploration and experimentation in entire cities and regions. These digital replicas of a cities system will (a) enhance day-to-day city management by helping city managers react quickly to real-time events through rapid experimentation of different decision impacts, and (b) ensure longer term policy decisions are more effective and trusted by enabling city managers from different units, to explore and discuss with citizens and businesses city issues in a visual, easy-to-digest way via a common view. Thanks to the 3D interface public administrations will, for the first time, more easily harness the collective intelligence of ALL policy stakeholders to tackle complex, systemic policy problems that require innovative thinking from multi-sectors to develop transformative solutions. Developed and tested in cities and Regions at different points in their digital transformation journeys – Flanders Region, Belgium, the City of Athens, Greece and City of Pilsen, Czech Republic – DUET will create the concept of Policy-Ready-Data-as-a-Service and ensure all cities across Europe will be able to create their own their own Digital Twins that address ethical considerations around data use whilst also complying with Europe’s stringent privacy and security regulations.