The SPACE4Cities project aims to procure a range of replicable solutions that use European satellite data for better and more dynamic management of public areas, green spaces, transport infrastructure and city maintenance – and the cities’ overall resilience.
Objective
SPACE4Cities aims to use satellite data by exploiting the earth observation services provided by the European Space Agency ESA’s Copernicus program and location services offered by ESA’s Galileo program to improve dynamic management of public spaces and infrastructure. These ESA services can be combined with companies’ own solutions and services.
Duration, funding and partners
Duration: 1.2.2024–31.7.2027
Funding: SPACE4Cities is a Pre-Commercial Procurement financed by European Union’s Horizon Europe program. The total budget for SPACE4Cities is 5,2 million euros, of which 2,9 million euros are earmarked for companies to design, prototype and test innovative solutions that go beyond the state-of-the-art. The budget share for Forum Virium Helsinki is 708 875 euros.
Partners: The project consortium consists of six procuring partners that form the Buyers’ Group as well as one expert partner.
Buyers’ Group consists of Forum Virium Helsinki, Municipality of Amsterdam, District09 (Belgium), Municipality of Guimarães (Portugal), Innovation Attica (Regional Development Fund of Attica Region, Greece), Open and Agila Smart Cities (OASC, Belgium). Aerospace Valley (France) participates as expert partner that handles Open Market Consultation.
The role of Forum Virium Helsinki
Forum Virium Helsinki works in the leading role of taking care of project management, project communication, stakeholder management and dissemination of results as well as management of tendering and procurement contracts. Forum Virium also provides their own experts for the use of the project.
Benefits for Helsinki
The City of Helsinki is looking to get benefits in repurposing public spaces that are not in proper use.
SPACE4Cities also aims to stimulate the public sector in the EU countries to involve SME’s and midcap companies to use satellite, artificial intelligence and machine learning products to manage public spaces and infrastructure. Project aims to encourage and support the public sector to use innovative space-based applications and contribute to speeding up the modernisation of the public sector. Project aims to bring radical improvements to the quality and efficiency of public services by encouraging the development, validation and certification of breakthrough space-based solutions.
Sustainability
The project aims to help cities to adapt to the changing environmental conditions and their impacts on cities, such as predicting and adapting to sea level rise, floods, and temperature changes.
Dynamic multi-purpose usage of parking spaces and other mobility-related spaces can be allocated for different users in an agile manner. This could result in new pedestrian areas, cycle routes and low emission zones. The smart use of satellite data combined with the cities’ digital twins and 3D models of public space aims for advanced city planning and dynamic management of e.g. urban greenery.
Other sustainability goals of the project are: city planning, urban greenery management and identification of ad hoc maintenance needs of urban greenspaces and non-mobility spaces.
The evidence-based decision-making supports the cities’ goals on carbon neutrality, preservation of urban greenery and re-greening.
Project channels
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