Last June, Valencia hosted the fourth meeting of the MAtchUP project. Just in the middle of the demonstrator developments, the three lighthouse cities (Valencia, Dresden, Antalya), together with the follower cities (Herzlyia, Kerava, Ostend and Skopje), have met to share the advances during this first year and a half of project.

In the parallel sessions we discussed the main pillars of the project: energy, mobility, ICT and non-technical actions. The three cities showed their developments about the city platforms, such as open data portals, representations of data sets and dashboards.

During the second day, we enjoyed an interesting guided tour around several places of interest for the project. Starting with the Valencia Office of Traffic Management, the project partners could feel in first person how the traffic in the city is monitored, how the flow of vehicles is controlled and traffic incidents are managed.

Later, the consortium visited a school where interventions are carried out within the MAtchUP project (for example, the 50/50 program). The staff showed us their educational work thanks to energy efficiency projects and power consumption awareness and climate change, with great impact on students.

In addition, the City Council of Valencia explained the citizen collaboration platform DecidimVLC and the AppValencia mobile application, which includes a multitude of functionalities and services that can be carried out using the urban smart city platform VLCi from Valencia.

During the afternoon of the second day we focused on different working groups to analyze in detail the indicators used in the project. The importance of a good definition of these indicators and establishing the bases for their measurement and comparison with a baseline, either real or simulated, is a key aspect in the second part of the project, where interventions will be monitored, thus obtaining the conclusions and the degree of impact and improvement achieved.

At the end of the day, we enjoyed the natural landscape of the outstanding Albufera Natural Park of Valencia.

The following plenary meeting will be in one of the follower cities, Skopje, in December of this year. See you in North Macedonia!

If you want to know more about the project, you can visit the website of MAtchUP.