TRANSFORM was a collaboration involving six European cities – Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Copenhagen (Denmark), Genoa (Italy), Hamburg (Germany), Vienna (Austria) and Lyon (France) – and 13 partners working together to improve their policy and programmes to lower carbon dioxide emissions.

STEEP (Systems Thinking for Comprehensive City Efficient Energy Planning) was an innovative European project delivered in partnership between the cities of San Sebastian (Spain), Bristol (United Kingdom) and Florence (Italy). These cities decided to join together adopting a ‘systems thinking’ methodology in combination with open-data sourcing to improve efficiency along all the key aspects of their energy value chain, by applying smart city concepts in an integrated manner while learning from each other’s expertise in applying sustainable practices.

The STEP-UP project brought together four European cities – Glasgow, Ghent, Gothenburg and Riga, along with research organisations and businesses – with the aim to improve the integration of energy and urban planning, to help cities enhance their Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SEAPs), as developed under the European Commission’s Covenant of Mayors initiative, and to develop innovative projects at the intersection of the transport, energy and ICT sectors.

By connecting scientific excellence and innovative enterprises in the energy sector with ambitious and well-organised cities, the PLEEC project aimed to reduce energy use in Europe, contributing to the EU´s 20-20-20 targets. The project followed a place-based approach to enforce endogenous urban development by considering local conditions in six cities: Eskilstuna (Sweden), Tartu (Estonia), Turku (Finland), Jyväskylä (Finland), Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and Stoke-on-Trent (United Kingdom).

The InSMART project brought together cities and scientific and industrial organisations in order to implement a comprehensive model addressing a city’s current and future energy needs through an integrative and multidisciplinary planning approach. This approach identified the optimum mix of short, medium and long-term measures for a sustainable energy future, addressing the efficiency of energy flows across various city sectors with regards to economic, environmental and social criteria, and paving the way towards the actual implementation of priority actions.