SPARCS and fellow Smart cities and communities EU Lighthouse City projects RESPONSE and NEUTRALPATH co-presented their work in the meeting of climate work contact persons of Finnish municipalities on 21 May in Helsinki. The hybrid meeting was organized by the Association of Finnish Municipalities Kuntaliitto in collaboration with the Lighthouse projects, and included around 70 participants from small, medium and large sized municipalities across Finland. The Finnish Lighthouse project representatives presented the work done in the projects on urban energy transformation and the key insights and experiences gained from participating in EC funded Lighthouse research and innovation projects from the cities’ perspectives.

The session on Lighthouse Cities started with Mari Hukkalainen from VTT presenting  the general premise of Lighthouse City projects and the positive energy district concept, and the alignment with EU Cities Mission, NetZeroCities and Scalable Cities networks. Jani Tartia from City of Espoo continued with a presentation of SPARCS project and the learnings gained, focusing on the developed Co-creation model for sustainable and smart urban areas (www.co-creatingsparcs.fi) and the learnings from working in the project with diverse partners across Europe. Helmi Anderson from RESPONSE project (https://h2020response.eu/) and City of Turku presented the projects’ key demonstration area Ylioppilaskylä, and the main activities done to develop the district towards energy positivity. Finally, Eira Linko from City of Vantaa and NEUTRALPATH project (https://neutralpath.eu/) presented key insight gained from a questionnaire study on energy and construction sectors’ perspectives on sustainability. The presentations were followed by a lively discussion, highlighting the different ambitions of different sized municipalities and cities.

The Finnish Lighthouse Cities meet regularly to exchange experiences, learn from the work done in other projects through organized site visits, and develop joint activities together. Earlier this year, representatives from five different projects co-authored a paper in the Rakennustekniikka magazine on urban energy transformation (https://view.taiqa.com/ril/rakennustekniikka-1-2024#/page=32).