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Creating a Resilient and Sustainable Smart City
By Piero Pelizzaro, Chief Resilience Officer - Direttore Della Direzione Di Progetto


Piero Pelizzaro, Chief Resilience Officer - Direttore Della Direzione Di Progetto
Based on a holistic “people, place, and platform” approach, it implemented a variety of innovative tools and measures in relation to the three dimensions of people (user-centric smart city services co-designed with citizens), place (infrastructure solutions for: low-energy districts, e-mobility, retrofitting of buildings, installation of sustainable energy management systems and smart lampposts) and platform (urban sharing platform based on open data). Such approach allowed to test the “human-centered smart cities” concept, recognising the pivotal role of citizens rather than technology, crucial to enable the behavioral change, necessary to transform cities and maximize the policy effectiveness.

The project carried out six main actions in the “Sharing Cities” area regarding Deep Building Retrofit, Shared e-Mobility (with five sub domains: charging points, e-car sharing, e-bike sharing, e-logistics, and smart parking), Smart Lampposts, Sustainable Energy Management Service (SEMS), Urban Sharing Platform (USP) and Digital Social Market (DSM), with the aim of replicating and scaling up to the rest of the city.

Deep Building Retrofit
328 flats, 24,000 sqm of private and 4,500 sqm of public residential buildings have been deep retrofitted allowing an average 60 percent reduction in energy consumption and increasing comfort inside dwellings, by means of the stabilization of internal temperature at 24-25 degrees, and humidity level at 30-70 percent. Deep retrofit interventions consisted in renewing the buildings by integrating them with low carbon energy sources (solar PV, water source heat pump) and energy management systems which serve for monitoring and managing the energy consumption. Technical planning based on an inclusive approach envisaging owners’ engagement through co-design processes.
A series of meetings and workshops were organised with the aim of collecting needs and providing information to the buildings’ owners about the project content and the energy efficiency interventions. Such co-design process proved crucial to the implementation of the deep retrofit interventions as it created consensus and increased the probability, speeding up the process, of reaching the majority in the vote of the condominium assemblies, necessary to approve the interventions.
Shared E-Mobility: Creation of Inter- Modality Hubs
10 e-cars for corporate car-sharing, 2 e-cars for condominium car sharing, 150 e-bikes with child seats for city bike-sharing, 11 e-logistics vehicles (9 e-vans and 2 e-cargo bikes), 60 charging points, and 175 smart parking have been put on the project area so to ease citizens’ mobility, increase its sustainability reducing traditional car ownership and use, and support the shift from high to low carbon mobility.
Shared mobility measures resulted in about 646.21 tons CO2 savings from the implementation time till the end of the project.
Smart Lampposts: from Humble to LED to Smart Lampposts
20 new Smart Lampposts integrated with smart technologies such as WiFi antennas, environmental monitoring, traffic flows controlling have been installed in the project area which was covered with LoRa WAN network. The experimentation demonstrated that the passage from humble to smart lampposts is feasible and convenient, so that other institutions are encouraged to shift directly, skipping the LEd lampposts step.
Sustainable Energy Management System
An advanced system for energy management and balance has been developed with the ambition to provide integrated, efficient, and interoperable energy management across urban infrastructures. More specifically, it optimises the relation between energy demand and supply, so as to reduce citizen’s energy use and bills; within the e-mobility area, i.e. charging stations, it balances energy peaks so as to avoid network failures. Finally, such tool plays the role of data-bridge drawing data from the retrofitted buildings and making them available for the USP.
Urban Sharing Platform
An ICT platform able to gather data from several heterogeneous data sources and provide functions and services that help in enabling a smart city has been created with the aim to aggregate data and control functions from a wide variety of devices and sensors (such as electric vehicles and bikes, smart lampposts, and energy efficient buildings), store, process, correlate the data and present information to the city and citizens so as to enable a better use of the city resources. The project has allowed the implementation of a data monitoring service layer realised with the view to demonstrate the potential of interoperability and data integration processes.
Digital Social Market
The DSM has a community of users and rewarders. Sharing Mi, hosted by an app, green Apes, rewards citizens’ positive behaviors. The application allows to access a community of people who share ideas, exchange good practices and concrete actions for a more sustainable lifestyle. Virtuous behaviors are rewarded through prizes and discounts offered by the local businesses participating in the project.
Sharing Cities represents a unique opportunity for testing innovative solution in a well-defined district area, contributing in making the City of Milan, and the other two lighthouse cities, aware of innovative solutions to be scaled-up for making the smart city a reality.

10 e-cars for corporate car-sharing, 2 e-cars for condominium car sharing, 150 e-bikes with child seats for city bike-sharing, 11 e-logistics vehicles (9 e-vans and 2 e-cargo bikes), 60 charging points, and 175 smart parking have been put on the project area so to ease citizens’ mobility, increase its sustainability reducing traditional car ownership and use, and support the shift from high to low carbon mobility.

Smart Lampposts: from Humble to LED to Smart Lampposts
20 new Smart Lampposts integrated with smart technologies such as WiFi antennas, environmental monitoring, traffic flows controlling have been installed in the project area which was covered with LoRa WAN network. The experimentation demonstrated that the passage from humble to smart lampposts is feasible and convenient, so that other institutions are encouraged to shift directly, skipping the LEd lampposts step.
Sustainable Energy Management System
An advanced system for energy management and balance has been developed with the ambition to provide integrated, efficient, and interoperable energy management across urban infrastructures. More specifically, it optimises the relation between energy demand and supply, so as to reduce citizen’s energy use and bills; within the e-mobility area, i.e. charging stations, it balances energy peaks so as to avoid network failures. Finally, such tool plays the role of data-bridge drawing data from the retrofitted buildings and making them available for the USP.
Urban Sharing Platform
An ICT platform able to gather data from several heterogeneous data sources and provide functions and services that help in enabling a smart city has been created with the aim to aggregate data and control functions from a wide variety of devices and sensors (such as electric vehicles and bikes, smart lampposts, and energy efficient buildings), store, process, correlate the data and present information to the city and citizens so as to enable a better use of the city resources. The project has allowed the implementation of a data monitoring service layer realised with the view to demonstrate the potential of interoperability and data integration processes.
Digital Social Market
The DSM has a community of users and rewarders. Sharing Mi, hosted by an app, green Apes, rewards citizens’ positive behaviors. The application allows to access a community of people who share ideas, exchange good practices and concrete actions for a more sustainable lifestyle. Virtuous behaviors are rewarded through prizes and discounts offered by the local businesses participating in the project.
Sharing Cities represents a unique opportunity for testing innovative solution in a well-defined district area, contributing in making the City of Milan, and the other two lighthouse cities, aware of innovative solutions to be scaled-up for making the smart city a reality.
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