CONTACT DETAILS
Project manager: Víctor MARTINEZ, victormartinez@santcugat.cat
Communication Manager: Mònica LABLANCA,monicalablanca@santcugat.cat
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The city of Sant Cugat del Vallès is a municipality of around 80.000 inhabitants near Barcelona with a strong commitment to sustainability.
Sant Cugat has pledged its commitment to become a smart community since 2010. The City Hall, in cooperation with the business sector and the civil society, is driving a strategic plan since 2011 in order to pursue a society based on knowledge, talent and innovation, in line with the current sustainable growth strategy promoted by the European Union.
According to this plan, the city put into operation a pilot project to test some of the existing innovative urban management systems. The City Hall delimited a sustainable high-tech zone (smart street) where to implement a series of innovative measures. First results are the implementation of a guided vehicle parking, an intelligent garbage collection point, a street lighting sensitive to presence, an irrigation system dependent of the humidity levels and a pedestrian crossing equipped with lighted sensors, amongst others.
Monitoring systems are also in place to help businesses with loading and delivery management.
After a one-year trial period, the smart street lighting initiative has been applied in the whole city, allowing a reduction in the economic and environmental bill equivalent to 30%.
According with its smart city strategy, Sant Cugat has also been one of the pioneer cities in Spain promoting the City Protocol Society. The City Protocol Society is an international forum that invites the city councils, industry, research organisations and other agencies involved in city transformation to work together in order to share knowledge and experiences in the sustainable transformation of urban spaces. This cross-sector partnership focuses on the establishment of international standards and politics that should drive the sustainable development of cities.
The city of Sant Cugat del Vallès has defined the goal of becoming a “Smart City” by 2020 and therefore strengthens its focus on innovation based on public-private partnerships, with a strong commitment to testing and deploying forward-thinking solutions, together with private companies.
The city has already achieved first improvements regarding the efficient management of its public spaces and is saving significant costs for energy use, lighting and water. A local automobile club study estimates that if the vehicles driving in Sant Cugat’s centre in search of parking spaces could reduce their search time by just two minutes each, 776,000 tonnes of carbon emissions could be reduced annually.
The city of Sant Cugat del Vallès develops its environmental politics backed up by the SEAP as developed in the context of the Covenant of Mayors, the local strategy against climate change.
Recently it has renovated and improved its compromise with the SEAP through a new resolution “Step forward of the Covenant of Mayors and agreement for local sustainable energy” (April 2014).