Leuven: A Smart City Experience

Lieve Heyrman, Tim Guily, Rébecca Deneckère, Elena Kornyshova, Ramona
Elali

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Lieve Heyrman, Tim Guily, Rébecca Deneckère, Elena Kornyshova, Ramona Elali. Leuven: A Smart City Experience. Smart Life and Smart Life Engineering, Springer Nature Switzerland, pp.261-272, 2025, 10.1007/978-3-031-75887-4_12. hal-04962609

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Chapter 12
# Leuven: A Smart City Experience

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Lieve Heyrman, Tim Guily, Rébecca Deneckère, Elena Kornyshova,
and Ramona Elali

**Abstract** Leuven is the eighth-largest city in Belgium with more than 100,000 inhabitants. It is a leading region in the creation of starts-ups, research centers, and applications on health and climate. Numerous organizations in the Leuven region and the city administration itself are currently cooperating in order to work out advanced ideas around Smart City technology, which is also a crucial step in Leuven's goal to become climate neutral by 2030. For this particular goal, the organization Leuven 2030 was founded. Leuven 2030 strives for a climate-neutral future for Leuven, representing inhabitants, companies, civil society organizations, knowledge institutions, and public authorities. They do this by combining science (scientific framework), social power (bringing people together around projects), and storytelling (inspiring stories about the steps taken).

**Keywords** Smart City · Smart City Strategy · Smart City Projects

**12.1 Introduction**

Leuven received the award of “European Capital of Innovation” in 2020. The prestigious award from the European Commission rewards the city that makes the best use of innovation to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants in creating new and groundbreaking solutions to public challenges. The European Commission

L. Heyrman · T. Guily
Department of Economics and Trade, Smart City Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
e-mail: lieve.heyrman@leuven.be; tim.guily@leuven.be

R. Deneckère · R. Elali (✉)
Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
e-mail: rebecca.deneckere@univ-paris1.fr; ramona.elali@univ-paris1.fr

E. Kornyshova
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherche en Informatique et Communications, Conservatoire National des
Arts et Métiers, Paris, France
e-mail: elena.kornyshova@cnam.fr
praised a unique symbiosis of empathy in leadership and structural collaboration between citizens, knowledge institutions, and local organizations to create a brighter future, for itself and far beyond.<fnref n="1" /> The city of Leuven applied for the award in close collaboration with Leuven 2030 and Leuven MindGate.

More recently, in April 2022, Louvain was identified as one over one hundred climate-neutral and smart cities to pursue ambitious goals to slash emissions rapidly and pioneer innovative approaches with citizens and stakeholders.<fnref n="2" /> These cities will be supported by *NetZeroCities* to bring together all key players within a city, including citizens, academia, and businesses, and implement transformative processes and innovative actions, with the objective of reaching climate neutrality by 2030. The opportunities are to contribute to the European Green Deal ambition to reduce gas emissions by at least 55%, to offer cleaner air, safer transport, and less congestion to citizens, to lead in climate and digital innovation, making Europe attractive for investments from innovative companies and skilled workers.

## 12.2 Smart City Strategy in Leuven

The Smart City unit of Leuven was initiated more than 5 years ago by the head of the Department of Economics and Trade, who noticed within her international network an upcoming relevance in the “smart use of technology” for local policies. From that moment on, a Smart City vision, framework, and strategy gradually developed and modified under the influence of continuous insights and lessons learned through our own experience with Smart City projects but also as a result of local and international Smart City networks that grew over time.

There are several smart key drivers that occur and are important in city policy. (See Fig. 12.1).

First, we can see that there is a change in the demographics that is occurring in the city. People living in the city are becoming older, they live longer, and, in consequence, the number of citizens is growing.

We have rapid urbanization as all these people need to be able to live somewhere. The housing market is very tight in Leuven as houses are very expensive.

All these people use energy, they need to use transportation, and it gives us strain on the traffic and the pollution. Environmental concerns are global, but they are also present at city level.

Climate change over the planet means that the water supplies are going down, and this is a concern also at the city level as there is a high amount of population and we all use these resources from nature. As these resources become scarcer, we have problems finding energy or water resources.

<footnote n="1">¹ https://leuven.be/en/capital-of-innovation</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² https://eurocities.eu/latest/the-100-climate-neutral-and-smart-cities-by-2030/</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 12.1** Leuven Smart City drivers</figcaption></figure>

There is also a technical aspect. A lot of people, and more and more people in the future, are using the Internet. This technology and others evolve very fast. This has been an important aspect to take into account when we set up our Smart City strategy.

These are the challenges that the city of Leuven, like other cities, are facing, and we tried to contribute with our Smart City strategy to address all these aspects.

Smart City Leuven uses connected, innovative technologies in the public space to generate and use the gathered data to gain insights into the functioning of the city and into the functioning of all these key drivers. The final goal is to improve the quality of city life so that people are happy to live in the city and feel well supported. We look for how Smart City can contribute to that goal.

Smart Cities also make a turn to data-driven policymaking. Before, policymaking was more based on people's experience, with trials and errors. Now, we combine this information with sensor data to identify if changes are beneficial or not. That is the direction chosen with the Leuven Experience, with gathering and use of data to support the policymaking of the city. This support in data-driven policymaking is provided via several modi: via monitoring and providing insights, via simulation and prediction, and via automatization and control.

At the start of Smart City Leuven, five targets could be defined (See Fig. 12.2):

* Optimization of flows. It can be general, like mobility, energy, waste, and economy.

* Sublime city experience. This represents how you experience the city as a visitor and also as a resident. It has to do with tourism and its economy.

* Harbor and grow talent. There are projects to support students to develop their talent.

* Smart health and Wellness. We focus here on environmental factors such as noise, heat, and so on.
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 12.2** Overview of Leuven Smart City projects</figcaption></figure>

* Smart City services. Internally but also related to visitors and residents living in the city to offer more smart services. This has more to do with the digitalization that is always growing.

## 12.3 Smart City Projects in Leuven

Figure 12.2 shows an overview of the Leuven Smart City projects, related to these targets. Also, the main focus of the projects throughout the different targets is defined: data of course, how it can make the infrastructure and connectivity smarter, and what the innovation attitude is. Also, some projects specifically focus on “citizen science” by involving our citizens in data gathering for the city’s benefit.

Over time, the need arose to rearrange the Smart City targets, since Smarter City services concern more with digitalization and IT projects, and harbor and grow talent is also handled in other city projects. Therefore, the current main three targets of the Leuven Smart City strategy are smart health and wellness, optimizing flows, and sublime city experience. We will go further into detail on each one (Fig. 12.3).

### 12.3.1 Optimizing Flows

**Shop & Go Project** The Shop & Go project is concerned with the optimization of flows and shared mobility. In some Leuven areas, you do not need any parking disc, parking ticket, or resident's card. Sensors on the floor of the parking area record
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 12.3** Selected Leuven Smart City projects</figcaption></figure>

your hour of arrival, and if you exceed the parking time, a parking attendant will arrive on site and you will receive a parking fee.

**Hoppin/eHUBS** Hoppin is a project embedded in a European project. It combines shared mobility and packaging. When shopping online, you can choose to have your package delivered to some specific place. This project combines different facilities related to shared mobility and delivery of packages into one eHUBS spot. eHUBS are on-street locations that bring together e-bikes, e-cargo bikes, and/or e-cars, offering users a wide range of options to experiment with and use in various situations. The idea is to give a high-quality and diverse offer of shared electric mobility services to dissuade citizens from owning private cars, resulting in cleaner, more liveable, and pleasant cities. The eHUBS in Leuven are characterized by the Hoppin polls (digital and analogs), which refer to the branding of eHUBS foreseen by the Flemish strategy that aims at deploying 1000 eHUBS in the Belgian region by the end of 2024.

**Mobility as a Service** A service in which different mobility services are offered to the user through one application. In this way, the user has access to the various mobility services. By using this application, the user can plan his transport modes. First steps toward this application were taken in a project funded by the Flemish government, and a follow-up project is currently ongoing.

**Citizen Science—WeCount Project** WeCount<fnref n="3" /> is a European project that enables citizens to initiate a policymaking process with fully automated measurement data in the field of mobility and air quality.

<footnote n="3">³ https://www.we-count.net/</footnote>
The community building process of WeCount was based on previous participatory processes, whether initiated by the local government or by the citizens themselves. Steps were taken to gain a good understanding of the local mobility context, supported by an existing rich participatory context organized by the city government and initiated by citizens.

Low-cost sensors are placed, by citizens, on their house's front windows. This sensor contains a small camera, and it counts what passes by. In particular, it can differentiate bikers, cars, trucks, and pedestrians, so it is used as a traffic counter.

This is a nice example of how citizens can contribute to the city's policymaking by gathering the data themselves. They were just asked to commit to this project, and then they received a low-cost sensor. The only thing they had to do was to plug it in and connect it to their Internet, and so the data came in and was used, in this case as one of the data sources for a new local circulation plan. This data gathering benefited the citizens themselves, as the studied area is very small; however, there are a lot of small roads but also a lot of people (families and children). There was a problem with the traffic and the use of the streets, and people were very concerned about how the traffic would be guided through their streets. This project allows them to be able to do something about gathering data themselves.

### 12.3.2 Smart Health and Wellness

Smart health and wellness is one of the main target strategies that we have for Smart City. Two citizen projects within this target will be presented in the next session: Leuven.cool and Night Noise project.

**Project Leuven.cool** It is one of the citizen science projects<fnref n="4" /> currently running in the city. In collaboration with the KU Leuven (who has the lead in this project), the Royal Meteorological Institute, and climate Leuven2030, this project studies the heat island effect in the city. The project aims to map the moderating effect of green elements in the city and in the gardens of citizens. The urban microclimate is created by the interaction between the urban surface and the atmosphere. The physical processes that occur are the result of energy and water exchange between the urban surface and the atmosphere, generating differences following the layout of the urban landscape. This project was set up after a heating up in the city with a higher temperature inside than in the green areas and urban surroundings had been noticed. We wanted to discover how likely the presence of green areas and water zones could have a beneficial impact on the heat island effect.

<footnote n="4">⁴ https://www.exello.net/nl/kennisdeling/leuvencool</footnote>
Over 100 weather stations are placed at different public places and private gardens in the city center and its surroundings (real time maps directly accessible online<fnref n="5" />).

Based on the data provided by these weather stations, a heat map and a network map were created, where the temperature was represented through a color code in order to be able to compare the temperature within the city center with the surrounding areas. The data obtained from those stations are used for scientific and research purposes but also at the city policy level as it allows to monitor heat spots that can be used as a starting point for beneficial interventions such as creating more green areas and introducing more water spots.

**Night Noise Project** The purpose of this project is to tackle the nightly noise using technology and nudging. Leuven is a lively city, and there are around 50,000 students staying and studying, which gives a nice atmosphere. However, students like to go out and have some fun, the same as the local residents. Hence, we have a lively nightlife, which may produce nightly noise in transit streets, which are the routes taken by students or residents while going home. Thus, this causes a problem for the local residents living in these streets because they are disturbed in their sleep. Different decisions were taken to tackle this problem, such as police control and direct intervention, by giving penalties in a repressive way but also by creating campaigns in a preventive way, with limited effect. Tackling night noise is challenging because it occurs only for a relatively short period. When a group of people passes through and makes noise, by the time a local resident calls the police to complain about the noise and the police come, the noisy people are already gone! In addition, the noisy people are not always aware that other people are sleeping in these streets, as at night the streets are isolated, which may give the feeling that no one lives there; hence, for them, there won't be any problem in making some noise.

Therefore, in this project, we combine technology and nudging techniques as a possible solution for this problem. There are three targets:

1. *Get insights into the nightly noise* with more objective data because we don't know how likely the reported noise is loud, disturbing, or annoying or when it is occurring, on which days, or at which times. So we need to get more insights about the night problem itself to objectify the first target.

2. *Classify sources of nightly noise.* There are different sources of night noises. Some of the noise is produced by traffic; then, it is difficult to have the police intervene or to use nudging techniques in such a case. Some other noises can be produced by humans directly such as singing and shouting, breaking glass or punching a garbage bag with the leg, playing music on a loud sound, etc. For this source of noise, nudging techniques might have a positive influence.

3. *Nudge to influence behavior.* Nudging is a motivation technique to stimulate and/or influence people in a subtle way to perform expected behavior. So it is

<footnote n="5">⁵ https://leuven.cool/</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 12.4** Night noise identification</figcaption></figure>

used to direct people to the expected behavior, in this case being more silent when passing through the streets at night.

The VLAIO City of Things is a recurrent funding initiative of the Flemish government and is funding the Night Noise Project. We set up this research project in cooperation with the local police and the local prevention service. The project focusses on a specific street called Naamsestraat nr.40 until 100. After a positive evaluation, this project will be resubmitted for new funding to extend to other streets hindered by nightly noise in Leuven.

Several noise sensors are placed in a 300-meter area between the Heilige Geestcollege and the arts center STUK. These sensors do not record conversations, but they do analyze all nocturnal sounds: what the volume is, how high or low does it sound, how long does it last, and if it comes from traffic, people, or music. There is also a meter in the city park, inaccessible overnight, to compare the noise measurements with a quiet zone. In addition, the residents are asked to report via an app when they experience night noise (what kind of noise, the time, the duration of the noise, whether their window was open or not). By combining the noise analysis results with residents' reports, the system can better identify which sounds are perceived as disturbing (Fig. 12.4).

In the next step, we found a way to classify the sources of nightly noise with an AI-trained model. The image below represents sensor data obtained between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., with the source of noise peaks classified as either human voice shouting or a traffic. Preliminary data analysis showed that part of the noise peaks come from an ambulance since a hospital is located in this street. However, it is difficult to control this type of night noise; therefore, this project focusses on sources of noises on which we can intervene (Fig. 12.5).
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 12.5** Night noise data analysis</figcaption></figure>

As in the image above, we are able to convert the data into a harmonica index to find out the intensity of the noise. Green indicates low intensity, orange indicates medium intensity, and red represents high intensity of noise. The first diagram is from a sensor in Naamsestraat. We can see how the orange color is dominant. The second diagram is from the sensor attached inside the park quiet zone. We can notice how the green color is dominant here. In addition, we can detect, from both diagrams, when the peak time and day are for the noise.

Since we have data from the sensors, we can process these data for nudging purposes in our Smart City Data Platform.

### 12.3.3 Sublime City Experience

**Smart Sporting Cities** The last project is the smart sporting cities that consist of monitoring sports and exercise behavior in the public space using AI technology. Sport Vlaanderen and the city of Leuven want to gather insights about the growing group of recreative athletes (athletes who work outside clubs) to strengthen the policy around them and thus encourage even more residents to exercise and exercise. The project, which was realized with the support of the innovative Public Procurement Program (PIO), will be launched in two pilot gardens in Leuven (Fig. 12.6).

In the first experimental garden in de Bruul Park, the sports infrastructure of the park is specifically monitored. The green park in the center of Leuven has a multipurpose lawn, a football cage, and a sports wall, where tennis and urban fitness can take place. The technology will have a permanent place until the summer of 2024 to monitor sports behavior on a permanent basis.

The second testing garden is the Philips site at the Leuvense ring. Mobile technologies are tested there to allow the measurement equipment to be moved to other sites after a certain period of time. Thanks to a solar panel and 4G/5G connection, these applications are independent of existing power and data facilities in public spaces. The Philips site focuses on the multipurpose lawn and the bar park between the sports center Sportoase and the Leuvense ring.
Fixed set-up - Bruulpark

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 12.6** Smart sporting city in Leuven</figcaption></figure>

Mobile set-up - Philipssite

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

**12.3.4 Smart City Data Platform**

All data coming from the different types of sensors (city wireless environment, waste management, parking, urban mobility) have been integrated into the Smart City Data Platform (Fig. 12.7). It is then possible to standardize the data between all sensors to have a cross-sharing experience of information of streams to provide an efficient, effective, and scalable platform (which can be used in other projects and in other cities), to have governance with a cost-sharing mechanism, and to share data between all cities. This integration of sensor data for different purposes is now possible even if it is not yet operational today.

We have two main layers in this platform: the IOT layer and the data layer. In the data layer, the data is being stored on Azure; thus, we can do some analysis on the data to get insights.

In the second phase, the city tested various nudging techniques. Nudges are psychological techniques that often unconsciously and in a simple way encourage people to change their behavior. For example, (Fig. 12.8) when one of the noise meters catches nighttime noise, public lighting can be dimmed. A message can also be projected on the ground between 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. in order to make noise makers aware that they are waking someone up. The city chose to first experiment with the dimming or the intensification of the public lighting in the project area of the Naamsestraat. The noise sensor detects noise peaks with the label “human shouting,” or the residents could use the app to report the night noise. Then, an AI algorithm processes this data, and a trigger is sent through the Smart City Data Platform in order to dim or intensify public lighting. Consequently,
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 12.7** Leuven Smart City Data Platform</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 12.8** Data Platform usage for night noise management</figcaption></figure>

a different atmosphere is created in the streets, which might indirectly influence people's behavior.

These so-called incidental nudging techniques are combined with more semi- and permanent nudges such as floor stickers and projections on streets indicating that it is a sleeping zone. Preliminary results of the project suggest a positive effect of the nudging techniques on nightly noise; however, more data need to be gathered to draw more conclusive conclusions.
## 12.4 Conclusion

The Leuven Experience is still an ongoing project that will integrate a lot of other sub-projects in the years to come. For most of the projects, there was an analysis on the data to analyze for impact: for the nightly noise project, we made a statistical analysis to measure the impact on the nightly noise of the intervention. For the project mobility, we measured mobility streams at different moments and use this on our traffic model to measure impacts of decisions and interventions. We didn't plan to do any surveys as they are quite costly in terms of money and staff (and not repeatable over the course of time).

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