Today's building permit issuance is mainly a manual, document-based process. It therefore suffers from low accuracy, low transparency and low efficiency. This leads to delays and errors in planning, design and construction. Several EU countries have developed attempts to push forward the digitalisation of building permit procedures. But none of these have led to complete adoption of digital building permit processes within municipalities. The aim of CHEK is to take away barriers for municipalities to adopt digital building permit processes by developing, connecting and aligning scalable solutions for regulatory and policy context, for open standards and interoperability (geospatial and BIM), for closing knowledge gaps through education, for renewed municipal processes and for technology deployment in order to reach TRL 7. CHEK will do this by providing an innovative kit of both methodological and technical tools to digitise building permitting and automated compliance checks on building designs and renovations in European urban areas and regions. The CHEK consortium consists of a multidisciplinary team covering GIS, BIM, municipal processes and planning, data integration and standardisation. In addition, the consortium is a multisectoral mix of research&education, AEC- and software-companies, governmental institutions, and international standardisation organisations. The multisectoral and multidisciplinary consortium is essential to align and connect all aspects of digital permit processes required to meet the highly ambitious project objectives. Several partners are already collaborating in the European Network for Digital Building Permit (EUnet4DBP). The institutions in the advisory board, representing governments and municipalities of other European countries, will further assist the development, exploitation, and upscaling of results. The best practices and developed software following the logic of OpenAPI will enable replicability in any other European country.

UNaLab will develop, via co-creation with stakeholders and implementation of ‘living lab’ demonstration areas, a robust evidence base and European framework of innovative, replicable, and locally-attuned nature-based solutions to enhance the climate and water resilience of cities. UNaLab focuses on urban ecological water management, accompanied with greening measures and innovative and inclusive urban design. The UNaLab partners aim to develop smarter, more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable local societies through nature based innovation jointly created with and for stakeholders and citizens. UNaLab’s 3 front runner cities: Tampere, Eindhoven and Genova, have a track record in smart and citizen driven solutions for sustainable development. They support 7 follower cities: Stavanger, Prague, Castellon, Cannes, Basaksehir, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires plus share experiences with observers as City of Guangzhou and the Brazilian network of Smart Cities. Therefore UNaLab results will impact on different urban socio-economic realities, with diversity in size, challenges and climate conditions. In order to create an EU reference demonstration and go-to-market environment for NBS, UNaLab will use and further develop the ENoLL Urban Living Lab model, and the European Awareness Scenario Workshop method for the co-creation of solutions, and the roadmap approach, in this way achieving an innovative NBS toolbox. Roadmaps will be used in all 10 cities, but in particular serve the follower cities. VTT, with a track record in the field of urban sustainability and Smart Cities, leads UNaLab. The UNaLab consortium is comprised of 29 partners across 12 different European countries and three non-EU countries. The consortium is well-balanced, representing key stakeholders within the value chain of urban challenges and smart, sustainable cities (public bodies, research institutions, large industries, small and medium enterprises.

The Triangulum project will demonstrate how a systems innovation approach based around the European Commission’s SCC Strategic Implementation Plan can drive dynamic smart city development. We will test the SIP across three lighthouse cities: Manchester, Eindhoven and Stavanger, which represent the main typologies of European cities. They will be complemented by our follower cities Prague, Leipzig and Sabadell. This powerful combination reflects an urban population of between 100k and 1,2m inhabitants across six different countries, allowing us to demonstrate successful replication across a wide range of typical urban areas in Europe. Each city has already made significant progress towards the transition of becoming a smart city; developing their own individual approach reflecting specific local circumstances. These inherent strengths will now serve to accelerate the smart city development across proposed demonstration sites within Triangulum. The suite of projects developed will be based around zero/low energy districts, integrated infrastructures and sustainable urban mobility designed to deliver a range of cross-cutting outcomes across different sectors and stakeholders. This will provide the basis to ‘road test’ the SIP and provide recommendations to the Commission on how it could be improved to facilitate wider replication. The Triangulum goals target a series of direct impacts around; reduced energy consumption of buildings, increased use of renewable energies, increased utilisation of electric vehicles, deployment of intelligent energy management technologies and the deployment of an adaptive and dynamic ICT data hub. The design and implementation of innovative Business Models and the activation of citizens as co-creators are core cross-cutting elements to base the technologies in real-world city environments and facilitate replication.