BABLE Smart Cities

03/09/2026

15 minutes on a map and 15 minutes on foot are not the same 15 minutes 🕟

Perceived distance and metric distance diverge for very different reasons: a green corridor feels shorter, a windy or poorly lit stretch feels longer, even when the metres are identical. That gap decides who actually gets to use a city on foot, whether it's a child, an older resident, or someone who simply doesn't feel safe crossing a square at night.

As part of the DUT-CitySync initiative, alongside Kocaeli Büyükşehir Belediyesi, Shared City Foundation and Drees & Sommer, we're testing this directly: mapping parameters like green space, noise, wind, local commerce or road width against real pedestrian route choices, now extending across different urban cultures and contexts, with safety and sidewalk conditions coming next.

It's a reminder that the only works if it's measured from how people actually experience distance, not just how far it is on paper.

What would you add to the list of parameters that shape how far something feels? 🌍

Urban Mobility is (also) a social science – Part VI ! Here comes one of my favourite topics 😍 and the one I have been working closely on for the last few years. Does a really mean 15 minutes, everywhere, and for everyone? 📐We measure our paths in distance or t...

01/09/2026

Online shopping keeps growing, and so does the traffic it creates.

The last mile, that final stretch from warehouse to doorstep, is where most of that pressure lands. Congestion, air pollution, collisions, illegal parking, limited access in already dense city centres.

Cities are testing very different fixes. Manchester runs electric cargo bikes for goods delivery. Stockholm has swapped in fully electric van fleets. Barcelona handles microdistribution through local consolidation centres. Munich uses shared district parcel boxes instead of individual drop-offs. Dublin is even piloting delivery robots on a university campus.

No single winner yet, just cities finding what fits their own streets.

We've mapped these approaches and more inside our Last Mile Delivery hub. Explore it here 👉 https://ow.ly/VKzl50ZHi30

31/08/2026

Mainz edition:

Your city has an air quality problem and traffic is the cause. Do you ban the cars? 🚗 Mainz found a different answer: measure first, then act precisely.

The city worked with Hawa Dawa to combine IoT air quality sensors with data analysis and dynamic forecasting, feeding into a web interface planners can actually use. Instead of one blunt city-wide rule, Mainz can see exactly which streets and which hours are the problem.

The clever part? Forecasting turns air quality from a report card into a planning tool. You stop learning what went wrong last month and start choosing which measure will work next week.

A reminder that the hardest part of clean air policy is rarely the ambition. It's knowing which intervention, where, and when.

📱 Scan the QR to read the full use case.

28/08/2026

🔧 Circularity just became the law of the land for European cars.

From today, the End-of-Life Vehicles Regulation reshapes how vehicles are built, from first design to final teardown. In practice, the regulation will:

🔹Push manufacturers to think about a car's end of life at the drawing board, not after
🔹Make dismantling, repair, and recovery part of the design brief itself
🔹Turn steel, aluminium, copper, and plastic from waste into a resource stream
🔹Give the industry a real alternative to depending on newly mined and imported materials

The result is less a new regulation and more a new mindset: cars as temporary arrangements of materials that will have another job to do, again and again.

Learn more 👉 https://lnkd.in/e25Ntmxd

🚗 New rules for a more circular and resilient EU automotive industry enter into force today! The End-of-Life Vehicles (ELV) Regulation will: ✅ improve resource efficiency ✅ encourage vehicle design that makes dismantling, reuse, recycling and recovery easier ✅ improve the information availa...

27/08/2026

Most cities talk about climate neutral mobility in the abstract. CIVITAS Forum 2026 is putting it to a live test instead 🔍

At "The Thessaloniki Challenge: Thessaloniki vs Europe on the Road to Climate Neutral Mobility," Thessaloniki's own transformation, pedestrianised streets, a car free central square, a district under regeneration, a reclaimed waterfront, a new metro, gets held up against practice from other European cities across three themes: reallocating public space and reducing car dependence, financing and governing the path to climate neutrality, and using data and citizen engagement to prove interventions actually work.

Breogan Sanchez, Senior Urban Mobility Expert at BABLE Smart Cities, joins Angel Lopez Rodriguez, Mobility General Coordinator at Barcelona City Council, on the panel. The three round, head to head format, with audience votes after each, is designed to produce something more useful than the usual takeaways: a documented set of implementation steps and pitfalls from a mid sized city working under real constraints, and transferable lessons on street reallocation, climate governance, and mobility data.

It is exactly the kind of evidence based comparison the mobility transition needs more of :train:

📆Wednesday, 16 September, 16:15–17:30, CIVITAS Forum 2026, Thessaloniki.
Add the session to your agenda: https://ow.ly/WNRV50ZBTKb

If you're attending, make sure to connect with Breo and dig into the discussion.

25/08/2026

BABLE is heading to GreenCities Málaga!

We're excited to announce that Cristian Verdaguer, our Senior Procurement Expert for Southern Europe, will be representing BABLE at this year's GreenCities, taking place on 15–16 September 2026 at FYCMA – Palacio de Ferias y Congresos de Málaga.

Under this year's theme, "Future Ready Territories," GreenCities brings together cities, companies, and public administrations shaping the future of urban intelligence and smart mobility.

If you're attending, come find Cristian at our booth to talk procurement strategy, market access, and how BABLE helps cities and companies connect around smart city solutions.

See you in Málaga! 🇪🇸

24/08/2026

Your city wants 5G everywhere. Where do you put the antennas? 📡 Eindhoven had an answer: the streetlights were already there.

At High Tech Campus Eindhoven, Signify, Ericsson and Vodafone turned the lighting infrastructure into the network. BrightSites smart poles and broadband luminaires now carry Fixed Wireless Access, public Wi-Fi and 5G backhaul across the whole campus, installed in under six months and funded entirely by private investment.

The clever part? The hardest question wasn't radio engineering, it was electricity. Street lighting is wired to run at night, not 24/7. It turned out to be solvable by simply changing the circuit. A planning problem, not a technology one.

A reminder that the fastest route to new infrastructure often runs through the infrastructure a city already owns.

📱 Scan the QR to read the full use case.

21/08/2026

A reminder worth sitting with: currently, no European country is on track to meet SDG 13- Climate Action.🌍

Meanwhile, wildfires spread, soil moisture runs low, and rivers run dry. June's heatwave alone is estimated to have wiped €2bn off European grain production.

Climate action is often discussed in terms of what it costs. This summer is a quiet argument that the costs are already arriving, just on a different line of the balance sheet. Food, water, infrastructure, local economies: the everyday systems cities and regions are responsible for keeping running.

Plenty of good work is underway across Europe. The report is a useful check on the distance still to cover. 📊

Data: Europe Sustainable Development Report 2026

Reminder: currently, no European country is on track to meet SDG 13 (Climate Action). Meanwhile: wildfires spread, soil moisture runs low, and rivers run dry. This year's June heatwave alone wiped an estimated €2bn off European grain production, according to a recent analysis. Yet climate action i...

20/08/2026

Your beaches are packed. How would you keep them safe without turning people away? 🏖️

Summer arrives and the coastline fills up. Umbrellas edge closer together, car parks overflow, and the people responsible for public safety are left guessing at numbers they cannot actually see. The problem was never the crowds, but the lack of visibility. Without live data on how full a beach is, a city can only react once the situation has already become uncomfortable, or unsafe.

Santander took a different route. Working with Segittur, the city built a beach management system into its Smart City platform in 2021. 15 counting sensors and LCD displays now track live occupancy across 11 controlled beaches, backed by safety assistants and environmental educators on the ground.
The results speak for themselves: high accesses, strong daily usage, and a large share of users checking conditions before setting off. Every urban beach in the city now carries the SAFE TOURISM Certified seal, alongside EMAS and ISO 14001 compliance📊
Beachgoers get to choose where to go, and the city gets to plan rather than react.

How is your city using real time data to manage seasonal pressure on public spaces?

Scan the QR Code to read the full use case on the BABLE platform to see how Santander made it work.

18/08/2026

Europe is living through one of its hottest summers on record. Extreme is no longer a future scenario, it is a public health emergency happening now.

BABLE is a partner in , a new Innovation Action under the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change: 27 organisations, close to €10M, and one goal, making cities more resilient, healthier and fairer in the face of extreme heat.

The project works hands-on in 5 demonstration cities (Athens, Pécs, Sultanbeyli-Istanbul, Sevilla, Alba Iulia) and 3 replication cities (Oppeano, Southampton, Lower Hutt-Wellington), co-designing nature-based solutions, passive cooling, localised Heat-Health Action Plans, a Digital Heat Preparedness Suite, and the finance models to pay for it all.

What we brought:
🔹 Mapping urban climate finance instruments, so cities can actually fund adaptation
🔹 Supporting the demonstrations and capturing what works
🔹 Powering replication and city-to-city exchange through our Knowledge Hub
🔹 Driving communication and exploitation beyond the consortium

de la Torre has just returned from the first Consortium Meeting in Alba Iulia (29-31 July), held alongside and the Missions.

The clearest takeaway of this project is that is built on evidence: real interventions in public space, paired with rigorous evaluation of their impact on health, behaviour and equity. And this is exactly the proof cities need to scale what works.

Adapting to heat is not only about cooler streets, it is about protecting the people with the least shelter from it.