Achieving a climate-neutral and resilient society requires the transformation of Europe’s building stock, not only at the level of individual structures but also across neighborhoods and urban districts. This transformation goes beyond technical retrofitting, demanding an inclusive approach that engages all stakeholders in participatory processes. In response to this, BLUEPRINT, will combine technological innovation with participatory processes in digital solutions that foster greater citizens’ and stakeholders’ engagement and drive the adoption of sustainable renovation practices aiming to promote sustainable, aesthetic and accessible urban spaces with better living conditions for all. This will be achieved with a NEB grounded unified, evidence-based framework for urban regeneration and stakeholder participation integrating immersive and interactive technologies - including AI assistants in urban renovation, participatory and modeling tools, Building Information Modeling, Virtual and Augmented reality - in multiscale Digital Twins to create a novel and robust system for community participation during the design and planning stage of climate-resilient renovation strategies and efficient management of urban systems. Complementing this, an innovative low-tech, analog approach ensures inclusive participation aligned with "leave no one behind" principles, addressing gaps in current participatory tools, which often fail to engage vulnerable groups such as the elderly, disabled, and low-income communities. The project will validate its innovative solutions in Balla (IE), Issy-les-Moulineaux (FR), Athens (GR), Budapest (HU), Benetutti (IT), tackling diverse challenges like energy-efficient renovations, sustainable mobility, public space revitalization, and climate resilience. The learnings from these living labs will translate into new guidelines and recommendations in line with the Built4People Partnership goals to foster replication across Europe and beyond.

Urban ReLeaf is an action-oriented mission to advance citizen-powered science as a central resource for inclusive urban green planning in support of local policy making, European strategies and monitoring systems (e.g., the Green Deal, Copernicus), and global efforts such as the SDGs (e.g., Target 11.7) and GEOSS. The project will: (i) assess current urban greening policy processes within six European cities and co-create solutions that use citizen observations to complement existing data ecosystems and decision-making; (ii) support the validation and long-term inclusion of active and passive data from citizens for urban environmental monitoring within authoritative data streams, including GEOSS & Copernicus; (iii) Mobilize and empower communities through widespread participation in issues of public interest surrounding urban green infrastructure; (iv) develop a community of practice around topics related to the use of citizen observations for urban planning to foster knowledge exchange and develop capacities across multiple sectors; (v) produce flexible and innovative governance solutions to help scale-out inclusive urban green transitions in support of the European Green Deal and UN Sustainable Development Goals; and (iv) promote recognition, adoption and trust of citizen observations and other novel data ecosystems for environmental monitoring to trigger innovation within public institutions. The project is coordinated by IIASA, who led the WeObserve project, and involves partners from previous successful H2020 citizen observatory projects and as well as six cities (Athens, Cascais, Dundee, Mannheim, Riga Utrecht) that are willing to embrace new data streams for urban greening planning and policy making and to fully engage with citizens including marginalized and vulnerable groups. Urban ReLeaf is also supported by technology partners and those with strong links to Copernicus and GEO.

CLIMABOROUGH is an Innovation project designed to field test the ClimHub, Climate Sandbox and Climate Service concepts within 12 European Cities engaged in their ecological and digital transition. The project aims to enhance traditional urban and spatial planning approaches through data and knowledge based decision making (including a possible new role for GIS - Geographic Information Systems), including climate services co-production for transitions, cross-city and cross-country pilot co-creation as well as the tactical use of public procurement of innovative solutions. The goal is not just to enhance an open set of tools leveraging climate transition in cities, but also to boost the exchange of experimental good practices, experiences and lessons learnt in this field, to help cities meet climate neutrality by 2050. This will be achieved by the following expected results: (A) building ClimHubs of Cities and solution providers to work on experimentations in real conditions, (B) harnessing the collective intelligence of local stakeholders for collaborative solution development, (C) defining Climate Services as a model strategy to use data and visualisation tools for climate transition, (D) field testing the Climate Sandbox concept as a way to prioritise and facilitate transformation of successfully deployed prototypes into established solutions for climate adaptation and mitigation in cities, and (E) monitoring and assessing the progress in achieving those goals and in implementing a climate neutrality planning scheme. Based on the lessons learnt and successful concept of the H2020 Designscapes CSA, CLIMABOROUGH has the ambition to bridge the gap between design and implementation of urban innovations, particularly in the domain of climate change adaptation and mitigation.

The growing level of interconnectedness of digital services and infrastructures creates tight and recursive security interdependencies between their providers, which are challenging to address due to the fragmentation of cybersecurity operations. This requires each provider to improve the security posture of its suppliers. However, existing practice, largely based on human interaction for disclosing vulnerabilities, reporting alerts, and suggesting remediations, demonstrates to be largely ineffective and risky. The MIRANDA project aims at operationalising awareness and remediation controls for service supply chains, by addressing feasibility, acceptance, and compliance issues. To this purpose, MIRANDA develops a Cybersecurity Digital Twin (CDT) to model and capture the security posture of such interconnected systems, which is used to detect, hunt, and remediate threats and attacks. The CDT will feature: i) functional and topological representation of digital services; ii) bidirectional control/monitoring data flow with real systems; iii) modelling and behavioural prediction of individual components and whole systems; iv) opaque representation of suppliers’ assets based on confidentiality and privacy requirements. The framework also encompasses the necessary security controls to safely exchange data and controls between providers. On top of the CDT abstraction, MIRANDA builds adaptive and automated processes for threat hunting, detection of lateral movements, and eradication of the root causes of attacks. Validation of individual components and the overall MIRANDA platform will be conducted in three relevant Use Cases, covering different platforms for Smart City services. The purpose will be to demonstrate the adaptability to the evolving context and the effectiveness to stop latest-generation cyber kill-chains and lateral movements across digital chains. The Project will also consider the new business and operational models that are required to run the platform.