Designing an Irresistible Circular Society (DESIRE) aims to create an alternative way forward for the built environment supporting the EU mission of ‘100 climate-neutral and smart cities’. Against seemingly insurmountable challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion we need to rethink our approach to finding solutions. Departing from architecture, design and art we will create an open learning environment with principles, methods and guidelines to support us in designing an irresistible circular society. We will present a DESIRE lighthouse demonstrator, built on insights and learnings from on-site demonstration activities taking place on sites in Denmark, Italy, Latvia, Slovenia, and The Netherlands, encompassing various themes and scales. By this, we will set the foundation for a school of thought and practice, and establish a scaling framework for widespread learning across the EU utilizing digital infrastructure, stakeholder involvement and empowerment across a partner community of European cities, youth organisations, NGOs, academia etc. Our territorial sites form the core of DESIRE. Three themes have informed our choice of sites and partners. ‘Creating social and inclusive housing’ addresses the need for inclusive processes, ‘the power of we’, in circular transformation of social housing. ‘Reconciling cities with nature’ is about designing livable habitats and functional ecosystems from a multispecies perspective while rebalancing ‘land use’ to accommodate resource generation and biodiversity. ‘Transforming through symbiotic relationships’ focuses on how to optimize use of materials flow when rethinking urban landscapes in cities. In depts on-site demonstration activities will unfold in three Danish sites (an old asphalt factory in Herlev, a social housing neighbourhood in Taastrup, and an urban transformation project in Kalundborg) and contribute to similar demonstration activities in Amsterdam, Ljubljana, Milan, Riga and Turin.

The decentralization of the energy system coupled with advancements on IoT, big data, AI and distributed computing are creating a new momentum for exploiting data-driven services to improve buildings energy efficiency. Despite a large number of buildings data hubs and vocabularies have become available, some barriers hamper the exploitation of that potential, such as the lack of interoperability among heterogeneous static (e.g.BIM), building automation and IoT dynamic data sources and ontologies, and the lack of interoperable big data architectures fully tailored to smart buildings. In that respect MATRYCS will i) deliver an open Reference Architecture for Smart Energy Efficient Buildings, which aligns BDVA SRIA, FIWARE architecture, SAREF, HAYSTACK, and BRICK schema vocabularies (among the many others), and enable B2B sovereignty preserving multi-party data exchange, while providing full interoperability of big data enablers with smart buildings standards and addressing privacy and cyber-security constraints ii) upscale a number of TRL 5-6 technology enablers, such as sovereignty-preserving DLT/off-chain data governance, big data pipeline orchestration, IoT/edge AI-based federated learning and visual analytics and deploy them within the TRL 7-8 MATRYCS workbench iii) deliver a TRL8 open modular big data cloud analytic toolbox as front-end for one-stop-shop analytics services development iv) validate such framework through the deployment of analytics services focusing on digital building twins, improved buildings operation, building infrastructure design, EU/national policy assessment for energy efficiency investments on 11 large scale pilots by different stakeholders (facility managers, ESCOs, financial institutions, construction companies, municipalities, electricity grid and DH operators, policy makers) v) setup the BDA Alliance as a vibrant data-driven ecosystem for attracting new data hubs and SME service providers, enabling thus EU-wise take-up and replication

Ensuring public spaces safety while preserving the freedom of citizens represents a challenge for European societies. Soft targets like malls, stadiums or big events continue to face a variety of evolving cyber and physical threats. To secure public spaces and other soft targets requires an integral security approach and new concepts involving all the security actors along with private operators. APPRAISE aims to build on the latest advances in big data analysis, artificial intelligence, and advanced visualisation to create an integral security framework that will improve both the cyber/physical security and safety of public spaces by enabling a proactive, integrated, risk-based, and resilience-oriented approach. This framework will be designed to support the secured private-public collaboration and optimise the coordination of operations involving private security staff, private operators, and law enforcement agencies. APPRAISE will offer unprecedented capabilities to predict and identify criminal and terrorist acts and enhance the operational collaboration of security actors before, during, and after an incident occurs. Social, Ethical, Legal, and Privacy observatories bringing together LEAs, private operators, technology experts, psychologists, sociologists, and society representatives will ensure full conformity of the developed tools with current EU legislation and citizens’ acceptance, preparing the ground for successful exploitation. The consortium consists of world-class research centres, industries, SMEs, LEAs of different types (national police, municipal police, elite tactical unit) as well as private security practitioners and operators, coordinated by a large industrial company with a leading position in the security market. APPRAISE will demonstrate its solutions in four complementary pilot sites: a tennis tournament in Italy, a transnational cycling tour with stages in France and Spain, an international fair in Poland, and a mall in Slovenia.

PHOENIX aims to offer a cyber-shield armour to European EPES infrastructure enabling cooperative detection of large scale, cyber-human security and privacy incidents and attacks, guarantee the continuity of operations and minimize cascading effects in the infrastructure itself, the environment, the citizens and the end-users at reasonable cost. PHOENIX will realise 3 strategic goals: (1) Strengthen EPES cybersecurity preparedness by employing security a) “by design” via novel protective concepts for resilience, survivability, self-healing and accountability, and b) “by innovation” via adapting, upgrading and integrating a number of TRL5 developments to TRL7-8 and validating them in real-live large scale pilots; (2) Coordinate European EPES cyber incident discovery, response and recovery, contributing to the implementation of the NIS Directive by developing and validating at national Member States and pan-European level, a novel fully decentralized inter-DLTs/blockchain based near real-time synchronized cybersecurity information awareness platform, among authorized EPES stakeholders, utilities, CSIRTs, ISACs, CERTs, NRAs and the strategic NIS cooperation group; (3) Accelerate research and innovation in EPES cybersecurity by a novel deploy, monitor, detect and mitigate DevSecOps mechanism, a secure gateway, privacy preserving federated Machine Learning algorithms and establishment of certification methodologies and procedures through a Netherlands-based Cybersecurity Certification Centre. PHOENIX consist of a prestigious consortium of 25 partners (+1 third party), supported by the CERT-RO, covering all required expertise including energy (RES) generation/VPP, TSO, DSOs, aggregators, retailers, prosumers, end-users, technology providers, SMEs. PHOENIX validation will take place in 5 large scale pilots covering the complete value chain from generation to consumption, including cross-border experiments and cascading effects to other critical infrastructures.

CREATORS enables local initiators to create and operate advanced Community Energy Systems (CES) by supporting technical, financial and social processes. With the sector moving beyond inventor-lead pilots, local CES initiators lack the capacity for high-quality simulation, business modelling and automated operations that are required in communities with a range of vectors, 1000s of mixed members, and balancing/ trading that requires controls in milliseconds. Leading engineering firms Cordeel and COMSA work with specialists in simulation and energy trading (i.LECO), emulation for digital twins (Typhoon HIL), and financing (EnergyPro) to develop services that enable local professionals to apply state of the art energy system technologies. These applications and integrated packages will mature from TRL5-6 to TRL7-8 and eventually be offered as ´CES-as-a-Service´. The services will deliver 60% preparation and operational costs reductions, ensuring 99,95% uptime, 20-35% CAPEX reduction, and up to 40% additional incomes. The results are 5-10% local energy price reduction (below €0,18kWh) in systems covering all vectors, with 10³ - 10⁴ participants. The approach creates 2 fte jobs in each CES, whilst for partners remote services could reach 10% the system turnover, in what is a high growth market. In standardizing simulation and assessment tools in close collaboration with local stakeholders (30 LoS), the BRIDGE initiative and lenders (industry-lead Investor Confidence Protocols), CREATORS significantly advances commercial readiness (CRI3). The applications will be developed in 4 sites (Belgium, Spain, Slovenia, Estonia), and replicated in another 6 (the Netherlands, Bulgaria, France, Spain). The pilots mix vectors, participants and business models, covering in total >2000 households, >500SMEs and >5 industrial sites. Ten more prospective CES will be supported in feasibility studies through a competitive process, which also aims to prepare for commercial market entry.