What do we want our cities to be?
What does Smart mean?
Which services and innovations do citizens and stakeholders really need?

Key questions for the MAtchUP project that aims at transforming cities through innovative solutions and technologies at the service of local communities.

MAtchUP looks at these cities as complex environments animated by multiple communities with common problems, needs and expectations to be satisfied and improved through a net increase in resilience, liveability and expertise.

Currently, cities tackle problems of pollution, energy consumption and overcrowding, risking to become unsafe and unhealthy places to live. MAtchUP foresees dedicated actions to improve the share of renewable energy, increase sustainable mobility and invest in technology. The aim is to repaint cities with brighter solutions at the disposal of their smart communities.

These solutions boost local economies and their quality of life. Furthermore, they serve as a model for replication in other cities and can lead to a urban transformation driven by citizens and stakeholders.

Where can I find MAtchUP?

MAtchUP deployed large-scale demonstration projects in three Lighthouse cities, Valencia (Spain), Dresden (Germany) and Antalya (Turkey), and supported the development of replication and upscaling plans in four Follower cities, Ostend (Belgium), Herzliya (Israel), Skopje (Republic of North Macedonia) and Kerava (Finland).

MAtchUP’s objective is to create and adopt solutions that can turn urban problems into smart opportunities to improve the citizens’ quality of life and boost the local economies. The final aim is to create a prosperous and more liveable urban environment for communities.

MAtchUP approach is built on three main axes:

1. Planning of sustainable urban transformation, which means to get rid of old and inefficient technologies to seize new efficient solutions in the energy, mobility and ICT fields
2. Effective replication and upscaling of smart city solutions by ensuring the convergence of the demand and supply sides
3. Implementation of these upscaling and replication plans to successfully reshape and repaint cities and their communities

To become a smart city means to provide the right services, tools and technologies tailored on citizens and on their urban environment.

By implementing technology-driven solutions together with non-tech actions in a smart and innovative way, cities can have the huge opportunity to increase efficiency and become more attractive for citizens and businesses.

MAtchUP solutions aims at providing effective qualitative and quantitative impacts on urban environments:

• the city transformation focuses mainly on the intersection of energy and transport excellence enabled by technology: deployment of smart homes and energy efficiency measures to reduce energy consumption and pollution and to increase investments in sustainable mobility and technological integrations
• Should not be forgotten that cities are the closest political level to citizens. A citizen-centric approach is crucial for the success of a smart city. Because of that, MAtchUP activities were highly tailored to citizens who played an active role in the co-creation of new urban strategies.

These solutions and activities have been translated into greener and prosperous cities built on the needs of their customers – mainly citizens, policymakers, businesses, academia, investors and non-profit organizations.

The MAtchUP consortium is made of 28 organizations from 8 different countries. Three lighthouse cities and four follower cities are supported by the expertise of universities and research institutions, SMEs, industrial and non-profit partners. They include research experts, policy makers, industrial partners, investors and dissemination and exploitation experts which basically represent all the targets of MAtchUP.

MAtchUP is part of the EU Lighthouse projects network. It is fully aligned with the network strategy and participate in network events to reinforce the collaboration with the rest of the European Smart City projects.

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