12 April 2019

UK cities Manchester and Edinburgh have begun to take part in smart city pilot projects with other cities on the continent, under the Europe-wide Synchronicity programme.

Manchester City Council is working on three projects aimed at channelling IoT technology. They include the Lighthouse Cities project, in which the city will aim to improve energy efficiency on its university and civic estates.

The project is part of a broader one on energy, mobility and ICT in which it is working with Eindhoven in the Netherlands and Stavanger in Norway. Manchester is also working with Eindhoven and Porto in Portugal on the SmartImpact project focused on governance, organisational and financing issues in the adoption of smart city solutions. Each city is developing an integrated action plan as guidance for future efforts.

These are underlined by the CityVerve project, for which the English city has provided an IoT demonstrator area since 2016. City of Edinburgh Council is working with Bilbao in Spain to measure and reduce noise pollution.

The Scottish city is using IoT technology and linking the outputs to data from other sources through the USMART data integration and insights platform.