BABLE Smart Cities

Urban Shark Tank – Smart City Expo World Congress 2026

Calling all urban innovators: got a project that's making waves in a city? Bring it to Urban Shark Tank!

BABLE is back with another edition of Urban Shark Tank, live on stage at Smart City Expo World Congress 2026 in Barcelona!

If you're from the private sector and have successfully implemented a project in a city, this is your chance to pitch it in front of our panel of urban "Sharks", experienced city and innovation experts who'll give you honest feedback, sharp questions, and real insight into how to scale your solution across other cities.

📅 4 November 2026, 10:45–11:30
📍 Barcelona, Spain

⏰ Application deadline: Friday, 2 October, 12:00 AM CET

Think your city project has what it takes to impress the Sharks? Apply now and get ready to present! 👇
https://ow.ly/IEFL50ZP7qS

Your coastal economy is drowning in waste oyster shells. Every year the shells pile up along the coast, expensive to remove, and with nowhere useful to go except landfill or the sea itself.

Yunlin County in Taiwan turned that problem inside out. Working with private material innovation companies, they developed Seawool, a high-value textile and construction material made entirely from discarded shells. A €500K-1M investment in R&D and pilot production has since built a full value chain from coastal waste to premium product, creating new jobs and business opportunities along the way.

Can your city do the same with its own overlooked byproduct? See how Yunlin did it 👇
https://ow.ly/e3sh50ZOGY5

Another Monday morning, another choice most of us make on autopilot. 🚲

Our colleague Breogán looks at what that choice actually costs, or gives back. People who walk or cycle in report lower depression and anxiety, sharper focus, better mood. Those behind the wheel show higher cortisol and blood pressure by the time they clock in.

Same distance. Two very different starting points for the day ahead.

It's a reminder of why we treat the Company Mobility Plan as more than a sustainability checkbox. Done well, it's a quiet form of care, one that shows up in how people feel long before it shows up in emissions data.

Curious how this could work for your organisation? Breogán's DM is open, or reach out to us directly. 💬



Original Post:

#companymobilityplan #activemobility #urbanmobility #wellbeing #motonormativity #cardependency | Breogan Sanchez 🚲🚎 | 30 comments One choice gives another meaning to the F-word. "Active commuters have measurably lower rates of depression and anxiety, better concentration, and improved mood, while car commutes are linked to higher cortisol, higher blood pressure, and lower life satisfaction." Same distance, but a very different...

Who actually governs the algorithms making decisions in our cities?

It's a question more urban leaders are asking as AI systems quietly shape everything from traffic flow to public services, often without residents ever knowing an algorithm was involved.

Our own Shannon Macika, Head of Project Delivery and Senior Climate & Funding Expert at BABLE, and city leader panelists will tackle this directly next week during a keynote at the Smart Cities Connect Fall Conference & Expo in National Harbor, MD.

📍 Tuesday, Sept 22 | 2:15-2:40 PM | Prince George's Expo Hall Theater
"Who Governs the Algorithm? A Participatory Session on AI Accountability in City Systems"

Rather than just presenting answers, Shannon will open the floor to a real conversation about accountability, transparency, and how cities can keep AI systems answerable to the people they serve. It's the kind of question every city grappling with digital transformation needs to sit with.

If you're heading to Smart Cities Connect, don't miss this one.🎤

Register here (free for public sector): https://ow.ly/Zr0h50ZNJLP

In a world where cities are expected to cut congestion and emissions while keeping freight moving, but with road networks that aren't getting any bigger, finding capacity that already exists makes all the difference.

In our latest BABLE Smart Cities Newsletter, we look at how Southwark, London is tackling a familiar barrier: last-mile deliveries keep competing for the same limited road and kerbside space as everyone else, and adding more low-emission vehicles doesn't solve a capacity problem that sits with the infrastructure itself.

The Kerb-Dock project turns an underused stretch of the Thames into a working piece of delivery infrastructure, giving freight operators dedicated, bookable cross-docking space to transfer goods onto electric vans and cargo bikes for the final mile, no new roads or vehicles required, shifting freight off the street entirely rather than just making it cleaner, for any city with a waterway to spare.

📩 Inside this edition:
🔷 A real-world use case on river-based last-mile delivery in London
🔷 A conversation with Madrid City Council's José Luis Cifuentes Sastre on turning municipal waste into working mobility infrastructure
🔷 Free webinar: how Böblingen district went from vehicle management to mobility management with 80 vehicles and not one free
🔷 Upcoming events: Smart City Connect and Smart City World Expo Barcelona

👉 Read the full newsletter here: https://ow.ly/kGNg50ZNF63

Across EU-funded Positive Energy District projects, one conclusion keeps coming up. The technology mostly works. What consistently gets flagged as the harder part is governance: aligning municipalities, utilities, developers and citizens around a delivery model that can survive beyond the pilot. Replication across different regulatory and climatic contexts is where most projects hit friction, not the energy systems themselves.

That's exactly what our colleague Gretel Schaj will be unpacking in Évora. As Head of Markets and Partnerships (Southern Europe) and a Senior Governance and Digital Innovation Expert, Gretel spends her days in that gap between ambition and implementation, so she knows where PEDs tend to stall and what it takes to push them past the pilot stage.

She'll be joining the panel "PEDs beyond pilots: are cities ready and who will deliver?" at the POCITYF Final Event, closing out years of work on Positive Energy Districts, climate neutral cities, and heritage sensitive urban energy transition. 🏛️

Two days of expert talks, panel discussions, a practitioner training session, and a technical visit to Évora's UNESCO listed historic centre. 📍 Évora, Portugal | 29-30 September 2026

Participation is free but spots are limited. Details, agenda and registration in the link below.

If you'll be in Évora, make sure to catch Gretel's panel or reach out to her!

♻️ Can a city help residents find a new home for their own used goods?

In The Hague, conversations with local circular entrepreneurs surfaced a simple but persistent problem: sourcing suitable second-hand materials, from bicycle tyres to leather, is harder than it should be. The municipality realised it could be the missing link between residents with unwanted goods and the businesses that could give them a second life.

To test the idea, the Municipality of The Hague teamed up with HMS Waste Management Company, Bureau BinBang and Made in Moerwijk to trial two collection methods: street containers for residents to drop off items freely, and household collection, picking items up directly from individual homes. The household approach came out on top overall, though it proved less efficient for apartment blocks, a nuance worth planning around before scaling up.

In under six months, with 70 households taking part, the pilot collected thousands of used goods, sorted and passed on to upcyclers, turning a small logistics test into a project the municipality now sees as a blueprint worth scaling.

📲Curious how it worked? Scan the QR code or find the link in the comments below

Could your city run a similar test to connect residents into your local circular economy?

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? 🌍

#perceiveddistance #15minutecity #cityexperience #zaragoza #15mc #inclusivemobility #hercity #sharedcity #dutpartnership #dutcitysync #citiesforall | Breogan Sanchez 🚲🚎 | 22 comments 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...

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

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.