The periASTY project, coordinated by ERTICO, officially launched its activities during a two-day kick-off meeting on 4-5 February in Brussels, bringing together over 60 representatives from 36 partner organisations. periASTY is an ambitious new Horizon Europe project that aims to integrate peri-urban areas in the transition towards climate neutrality by advancing and developing innovations in mobility, energy, industry, and governance.
Climate action and ensuring a more sustainable future is a top priority of the European Union and a key aspect in the new ERTICO Vision 2035. Achieving the European Union’s climate targets requires that peri-urban areas are fully integrated into ongoing decarbonisation efforts. periASTY will focus on these transition zones connecting cities with their wider regions while tackling the specific challenges they face such as high car dependency, congestion, and inefficient energy consumption. By doing so, the project directly contributes to the EU Mission: Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities and the climate neutrality targets for 2030 set in the European Green Deal.
Lidia Buenavida Peña, periASTY Project Coordinator and Manager at ERTICO, comments: “Peri-urban areas play a critical yet often overlooked role in Europe’s transition to climate neutrality. They are the connective tissue between cities and rural regions, where mobility patterns, energy systems and industrial activities intersect. With periASTY, we aim to support these areas in becoming active drivers of decarbonisation by equipping them with integrated, data-driven and scalable solutions that reflect their specific challenges and opportunities. Ensuring that peri-urban areas are fully embedded in the climate transition is essential to achieving Europe’s 2030 targets.”
periASTY will develop technological and non-technological innovations called periInnovations in four areas: mobility, energy, industry, and governance. The mobility solutions developed by the project aim to increase accessibility, safety, interconnectivity, efficiency, inclusivity, and reduce emissions, congestion and the use of private vehicles. They include low-emission shared micromobility services, algorithms for optimisation and synchronisation of services for seamless multimodality, on-demand tools, as well as new business models and pricing schemes. The energy solutions will support clean energy production and grid decarbonisation, such as business models and dynamic energy pricing schemes, renewable energy charging hubs, an energy system design and planning platform, and other assessment tools. Regarding industry, the periASTY innovations include an urban mining marketplace for construction materials and for circular economy, a smart waste management and recycling platform, dynamic routing algorithms for waste collection, and local Green Deal frameworks to involve industry in the climate neutrality commitment. Lastly, the governance solutions encompass federated data governance frameworks and integrated data-driven decision-making and monitoring tools for cities and their peri-urban areas.
The periInnovations will be co-designed with citizens, local authorities and various stakeholders and will be demonstrated in real-world environments in nine Living Labs in Europe, located in the peri-urban areas of Dublin, Limassol-Kourion, Ljubljana, Marseille, Guimarães, Helmond, Kalamata, Sofia, and Sisslerfeld. The knowledge generated will be used to create sustainable implementation roadmaps and generate recommendations for integrated planning and adaptive collaborative governance models. In addition, capacity building activities will be organised in other peri-urban areas to accelerate the transition towards climate-neutral, safe and smart European urban areas.
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