Urban food systems and ecosystems (UFSE) demand immediate action. CITIES2030 innovative approach have a great opportunity to attract the best researchers, entrepreneurs, civil society leaders, cities and all agents of the UFSE as well. The main goal of CITIES2030 is to create a future proof and effective UFSE via a connected structure centered in the citizen, built on trust, with partners encompassing the entire UFSE. CITIES2030 commit to work towards the transformation and restructuring of the way systems produce, transport and supply, recycle and reuse food in the 21st century. CITIES2030 vision is to connect short food supply chains, gathering cities and regions, consumers, strategic and complement industry partners, the civil society, promising start-ups and enterprises, innovators and visionary thinkers, leading universities and research across the vast diversity of disciplines addressing UFSE, including food science, social science and big data. CITIES2030 actively encourage the participation of citizens by delivering a trusted UFSE, moving consumers from being passive recipients to active engagement and motivated change agents. This objective is achieved via multiple tools delivered by CITIES2030 such as the CRFS Alliance, a community of practice supported by a digital platform, reaching all over Europe and beyond. This approach will enable policy developments, innovation actions within result-driven Labs, and enhancements on a pan-European scope with a global reach. Cities and regions will improve resilience and sustainability, and their leadership will create short food supply chain and ecosystems enabling local investments, trans-borders and transnational deployment. A blockchain-based data-driven UFSE management platform will secure intelligence and coordination actions by delivering an accurate, almost real-time digital twin of the whole supply chain, e.g. from production to waste management, but also on key enablers of resilience and sustainability.

DS2 draws researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines to secure that complex lifecycles of inter-sector data sharing, aggregation and provenance take place in a human-centric and trusted way, with common structures, exportability and insight, whilst protecting the sovereign rights of data owners and complying with European data regulations. DS2 provides a modular software infrastructure to connect data sources (Data Spaces/data silos/data lakes) together for the purpose of cross-sector data sharing. Once connected, data consumers and data providers will be able to structure and execute efficient complex data lifecycles that respect the technical and governance related requirements of the participating data sources. It will do this via an IDT (Intersector DataSpace Toolkit) which is deployed at each data source/space and network connected to any other IDT-enabled data source. The IDT Toolkit is composed of a Broker which manages the fail-safe network operation with no central point of control. Plugged into this is a set of modules for the execution of complex data lifecycles, e.g. filtering, labelling, both automated and catering for where human-in-the loop is required. DS2 will pilot and evaluate its technology using 3 well-defined, inter-sector use cases, (City Scape, Green Deal, Precision Agriculture). The DS2 solution enhances and accelerates the shift towards the data economy by addressing the challenges, pain-points, and requirements with respect to the execution of complex data lifecycle. Data consumers and data providers can now orchestrate, manage and securely execute complex data lifecycles to realize cross-sectorial data driven applications.