Copenhagen Solutions Lab, founded in late 2014, gave birth Through digital transformation, Copenhagen’s technology to the Smart City Street Lab, which encourages citizen solutions and partner ecosystems will deliver digital involvement as well as business development within its remit innovation opportunities for the city itself to create new of testing out smart and sustainable city solutions in the area revenue streams, improve access to public services, enhance around City Hall. It showcases the newest technologies and community experiences, and create new operating models accelerates partnerships with both the private sector and that drive increased efficiency. academia. In Denmark, implementation of green, urban, and smart Carbon Neutrality. In 1984, the five mayors of the solutions offers strong business cases with short payback municipalities that comprise Greater Copenhagentimes and high returns on investment. Copenhagen is at (Copenhagen, Frederiksberg, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, and the vanguard of smart cities, having initially adopted a high- Taarnby) decided to set up a common district heating system, ROI (return on investment) technology, smart streetlights, under which companies supplying energy could choose freely to make travel safer for drivers and cyclists. Nearly half of among the various generation plants owing to the integrated commutes in Copenhagen are by bicycle, making lighting a structure of the system. Two criteria drove the choice of critical element of the city’s efforts to guarantee the well- generation plant: i) the cheapest to take into operation; being of all its citizens. ii) the most suitable to cope with government-prescribed environmental directives. The City of Copenhagen’s ambition Copenhagen’s smart lighting system enables remote lighting is to be the world’s first carbon-neutral capital by 2025. The management and control. One of the city’s current projects current climate plan (CPH 2025) commits the City Council to is to deploy road condition sensors to determine when it is allocating 2.7 billion Danish kroner (363 million euros) for the necessary to sand or salt roads because of winter conditions. lifespan of CPH 2025 (from 2012 to 2025). The roadmap for Planners are acutely aware that sanding and salting increase CPH 2025 includes sixty-five specific projects. It makes the the carbon footprint, and they are dedicated to minimizing or climate plan tangible to stakeholders, citizens, and observers eliminating these measures if they are not required. more generally. For Copenhagen, another priority with regard to its smart We understand that the municipality has mainly focused its and sustainable city strategy is the publishing and provision smart and sustainable city initiatives on environmental issues of accessible and open data for all players. Through its open- related to its commitment for Copenhagen to be an entirely data platform, the municipality has published more than a carbon-neutral city by 2025. Under this vision, urban planning hundred diversified datasets, including, for example, real- and carbon neutrality are bound up together. The expected time visualizations of traffic flow and maps indicating the benefit of making the city carbon neutral will be at least one location of parking spots and public washrooms. billion Danish kroner per year from savings in the city’s use of heating, air conditioning, and electricity. Adherence to the There are plans to release large quantities of data and goal of carbon neutrality is evident in the urban development information about energy use in the city’s buildings and the currently taking place in Copenhagen. With the deployment relationship of that data to demographic data. Moreover, the of intelligent solutions in the city, Copenhagen is quickly potential of big data is being explored, with the Japanese becoming a leader in smart city technology, enriching citizen technology company Hitachi having established a platform experiences and improving operational efficiencies. (named City Data Exchange) in the spring of 2015. Hitachi has chosen Copenhagen for its first big data laboratory in Combining Solutions. With each new initiative, Copenhagen is mainland Europe. Hitachi is cooperating with the City of enabling a more intelligent use of the city’s existing resources Copenhagen, the Capital Region of Denmark (Hovedstaden), and improving the way in which it delivers services to its and CLEAN. 1 The latter organization is a Danish cleantech growing population and to visitors to the city. This is making cluster that is tackling complex challenges related to the the city more attractive to new business investments and green transition. The City Data Exchange aims to bring entrepreneurs. together private data and public data to create better public solutions and new business opportunities for companies. (1) https://www.sustaineurope.com/clean-denmark-s-paramount-clean-cluster-21072017.html (Accessed on 10 June 2021). 113 Quélin and Smadja | HEC PARIS | SMART CITIES | The sustainable program of six leading cities | 2021