BABLE Smart Cities

🔧 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… | EU Environment and Climate | 62 comments 🚗 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...

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.

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! 🇪🇸

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.

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… | Andreas Rasche | 70 comments 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...

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.

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.

Water doesn't ask for permission before it floods a street or dries up a garden. The neighbourhoods that thrive tomorrow are the ones designing for that reality today. 💧

That's exactly the conversation we're opening up in our next NEB LAB webinar, "Water Resilience for Neighbourhoods". As climate adaptation becomes less optional and more urgent, cities and districts need practical, community-led approaches to managing water at the neighbourhood scale, from stormwater to green infrastructure to long-term liveability.

Alexander Schmidt, our founder and CEO, will be joining Ginés Garrido Colmenero (burgos & garrido arquitectos) and Daniel Botha (ICLEI Europe) online, and bring BABLE's perspective on how funding, planning, and matchmaking come together to help neighbourhoods become genuinely water resilient. 🌍

Save the date: 27 August 2026, 10:00 to 11:00 CEST, online and free to join.

What does water resilience look like in your neighbourhood, and what's standing in the way of getting there?

🧭 Carbon reporting is often framed as a compliance burden. This one is a step toward making it simpler.

The GHG Protocol and ISO have announced plans to align their standards into a single unified framework for calculating emissions, merging ISO 14064 with the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. A first draft is expected in Q2/2027, with the standard taking effect in 2028.

For cities and regions, fragmented standards have long meant juggling multiple frameworks to satisfy different reporting obligations. One shared anchor point makes climate data easier to produce, compare, and act on, right as mandatory reporting legislation is scaling up across jurisdictions.

Is your city's emissions reporting ready for a single standard, or still stitched together from several?

The GHG Protocol and ISO announced that they will align their respective standards into a unified framework to calculate emissions. The new framework will align ISO 14064 and the GHG Protocol… | Andreas Rasche | 30 comments The GHG Protocol and ISO announced that they will align their respective standards into a unified framework to calculate emissions. The new framework will align ISO 14064 and the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. The first draft of the unified standard is expected for Q2/2027...

In a world where local authorities are expected to manage climate risk, urban growth and sustainability targets, but with fewer specialist staff than ever, having the right data at the right time makes all the difference.

In our latest BABLE Smart Cities Newsletter, we look at how Fundão, Portugal is tackling a familiar barrier: satellite data on land, water and climate risk is free and public, but interpreting it takes expertise most teams don't have in-house, and hiring consultants for every question is too slow and costly to make that intelligence usable.

The LandOS platform turns free satellite data into plain-language maps, analysis and reports that municipal staff can request directly, no geospatial training required, shiffting from occasional, consultant-led analysis to continuous, in-house capability, for municipalities of any size.

📩 Inside this edition:
🔷 A real-world use case on satellite-powered environmental monitoring in Portugal
🔷 How plain-language access to satellite data is helping cities catch problems before they escalate
🔷 A conversation with Liepāja City Council's Linda Alksne on building citizen-centred digital services in a small city
🔷 Upcoming events: Connected Britain, Green Cities Málaga, Smart City World Expo Barcelona

👉 Read the full newsletter here: https://ow.ly/XMZ350ZyOxV