Here at DG Cites our mission is to find practical ways to transform our cities, making them more efficient, and ultimately, more pleasant places to live and work. As part of our work we take part in groundbreaking co-innovation projects and we believe that consortium based projects like these are a fantastic way to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing us today.  But, we are picky about which projects we take part in, looking for those which have the potential to deliver benefits where it really matters – to all city residents’ in their everyday lives.

 That phrase ‘potential to deliver benefits’ is really important to us. Sometimes a new technology is not quite ready for commercial deployment and there may be unanswered questions about where, how or even if, it should be deployed. That’s where our research and development projects come in; we use them to  try out different approaches or to understand how people would feel about something happening. Of course, sometimes projects don’t work out how you're expecting them to, but finding that out is the whole point of R&D. However, we do have some great examples where we’re taking forward the findings of a successful R&D project into real-world deployment.

Sharing Cities is a Horizon 2020 funded project looking at how innovative and low emission technologies, combined with a community-centred approach, can improve the efficiency and environmental impact of energy and transport systems. As part of that project we’ve developed a digital twin of a Greenwich-owned housing estate and have used that digital twin as a tool to understand what the impact would be of investing in different types of energy efficiency measures. Put simply, we’ve been able to use the digital twin to understand “if we installed X, the impact would be Y” 

That’s been so successful that we are now looking to apply that approach to other housing estates owned by the Royal Borough of Greenwich.  Not only that, we’re also looking at where this could be deployed outside of Housing. And one that we’ve hit upon is Fleet.

In line with the wider council’s carbon-neutral aims, the borough has an ambition of converting its fleet to be electric. However this is not a straightforward decision, with both site and technical constraints which present barriers to electrification.   So in partnership with Imperial College and funded by Sharing Cities we’re about to start a project for Greenwich’s Fleet that will use a digital twin simulation to help support the Royal Borough in understanding how it can fulfil this ambition; scoping feasible charging solutions (both now and in the future), and developing a roadmap to improve charging provision that will enable scaling of the number of electric vehicles within the fleet.  Excitingly, all of this will be underpinned by our digital twin simulation, enabling an evidence based, data-driven approach.

Something else we’ve just been working on is an alpha project with Southwark, Lincoln and South Kesteven councils exploring approaches for the design of a common pattern for reporting, diagnosing and scheduling of housing repairs. The project was delivered by a digital agency called dxw digital and was part of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s local digital collaboration fund which funds projects that address common local service challenges in common, reusable ways.

At first glance, this project differs from most of our other work in that it’s looking specifically at a local authority service rather than a ‘big’ city issue, but below the surface there are a lot of parallels. For example, a key element was research undertaken by dxw with potential users of an online housing repairs service, to understand how the service should be built to best meet their needs.  

This approach is exactly what we advocate on our city transformation projects as we really believe that it’s only by understanding how people feel about technology and digital services that we can ensure that solutions are positive, workable and relevant. We’re hoping that this project will receive funding to enable it to continue into ‘beta’ and we’ll be writing more about it in another blog post soon.  

If you’d like to find out more about either of these projects or would like to explore how we could help you translate your technology trials into the real-world, then do get in touch by emailing us at [email protected].