Between 29- 30 March the city of Valencia hosted an important gathering of Smart Cities and Communities projects and representatives who collectively embarked on a “journey standing on the shoulders of giants”. They discussed the transition from Positive Energy Districts to Climate Neutral Cities and how to scale up the technologies and solutions to enable this transition.

ScalableCities and MAtchUP project organized a number of key sessions dealing with the pressing issues and challenges cities are facing in the race to reach the NetZero. Among others, projects shared experiences about their work related to business models and capturing innovative financing. David Škorňa from fellow city Kladno presented energy communities and their role in SPARCS to accelerate the energy transition.

SPARCs is part of Scalable cities network that represents 120 cities who are involved in 18 Smart Cities and Communities projects funded by European Commission Horizon 2020 with around EUR 345 million. With broad collaboration among academia, industry, associations and consultants, this network implement more than 550 demonstrations of technological and social innovations in the areas of mobility and logistics, buildings, urban data and ICT infrastructure, citizen engagement as well as urban governance.