City-zen, a balanced approach to the city of the future (CITY-ZEN)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Energy
Destination: Energy efficiency and savings
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Belgium,Netherlands,France,United Kingdom,Netherlands,Netherlands,Netherlands,Italy,France,France,France,Belgium,Netherlands,Netherlands,United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-SMARTCITIES-2013, 2013)
Start date: 2014-03-01
End date: 2019-11-30
Duration (months): 69.0
Total project cost (EUR): 40834286.38
EU funding (EUR): 25187743.1
Participants: 31
Project status: CLOSED

City-zen deals with the development of the city of the future. The project has three major goals, 1- to realize more effective collaboration models and a methodology for development of smart cities, 2- to connect with industry, and have them develop technology to the benefit of smart cities and 3- to showcase to society ambitious pilot projects. The approach taken is the set-up of stakeholder teams in the demonstrator cities, to accelerate the realization of energy-efficient city development. This effort is supported by technology teams including industrial parties. Workshops aiming at decreasing the gap between innovation and implementation will be organized and knowledge-disclosing material will be developed by specialized working groups in retrofitting, smart grids, and heating and cooling. This approach holds for both technology and process improvement. The demonstrators in Amsterdam and Grenoble include retrofitting 90.000 m2 of housing (about 1200 residential units) to levels down to a net building related energy use of 70 kWh/m2, showing an average decrease of CO2 emissions of the order of 80%. Furthermore they include fully-functional smart grid development (In Amsterdam for 10.000 dwellings), electricity storage demonstrators, free cooling schemes and district heating efficiency improvements such as a low temperature water loop for using in connection with heat pumps. This loop receives waste heat from a variety of sources. The close integration of advanced heating/cooling and electricity grids leads to the demonstration of an integrated “multi-territorial” monitoring system as well. The City-zen project recognizes the key position of citizens, so ample attention is paid to involvement, dissemination and education of this group. They will be involved through user groups. An advisory board with representatives from societal and citizens organizations will be organized. Serious gaming is included as part of the work, as well as a roadshow bringing the results of the project right at the doorsteps of decision makers in other cities. Extensive monitoring of all buildings and installations is included. Innovative technology development to achieve this will be developed. All 22 demonstrators together have an estimated impact of 35.800 tonne/year CO2 reduction. Amsterdam and Grenoble CO2 reduction goals for 2050 are 80%. In short, City-zen will create and demonstrate: - A transparent cooperation model to allow for the transition towards the future integrated city for all infrastructure owners, the local authorities and housing companies. These are all cooperating in City-zen so as to demonstrate that integrated approach have much higher impact that the sum of the individual initiatives. - A flexible and future proof infrastructure which invites and enables industries and city-zens to innovate, co-create and work together on new zero energy solutions. The planned investments in the demonstration area’s will be matched and optimised. - An (improved) methodology to validate and optimise zero energy solutions, including contributions from all infrastructures. - A series of innovative demonstrations, showing that it all works. We show all sorts of system integrations, including retrofitting, smart grid, bi-directional electricity grid, low temperature heating/cooling grid, cooling with drinking water, green gas production on neighbourhood scale.

Keywords: smart city,smart grid,energy efficiency,retrofitting,district heating,district cooling,ict,city planning,serious gaming,monitoring