30th June 2018
Urbanites in Sofia for EIP-SCC General Assembly 2018
Urban Foresight participated in the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) Marketplace General Assembly in Sofia, Bulgaria earlier this month.
Urban Foresight CEO Dr David Beeton was in Sofia as Chair of Electric Vehicles for Smart Cities and Communities (EV4SCC), and was accompanied by UF Head of Innovation Paul Blakeman. EV4SCC is the electromobility initiative of the EIP-SCC Action Cluster Sustainable Urban Mobility and has over 75 partners from at least 19 countries.
Prior to the start of the General Assembly, the EIP-SCC Action Cluster Sustainable Urban Mobility, held a workshop, at which Dr Beeton spoke. There he spoke alongside other cluster initiative leaders including Airbus and Nissan.
Urbanite Paul Blakeman, whose expertise lie in transport innovations such as connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) facilitated a workshop on the first day of the General Assembly on empowering citizens and local authorities to shape an autonomous vehicle future. The aim, of the workshop being to discuss how the development of CAVs could be aligned with the electric and shared mobility agendas and how cities could finance this.
On the second day of the assembly, Dr Beeton gave an overview of EV4SCC during the third plenary, as well as being part of a panel on sustainable urban mobility which also featured European Commission DG MOVE Head of Cabinet for Mobility & Transport. Other speakers at the event included London Chief Digital Officer Theo Blackwell and EU Commissioners Miguel Arias Cañete and Mariya Gabriel.