IFSTTAR and the City of Paris are both involved in the CITYLAB European project consortium addressing the challenge of the Horizon 2020 program on “Smart, green and integrated transport,” topic MG5.2.2014, “Reducing impacts and costs of freight and service trips in urban areas.” The project is coordinated by the Institute of Transport Economics (TOI), Norway over a 3 year period, from May 2015 until April 2018. The kick-off meeting took place on Thursday, May 21, 2015.

The general objective of CITYLAB is to develop knowledge and solutions that result in roll-out, up-scaling and further implementation of cost effective strategies, measures and tools for emission free city logistics in urban centres by 2030. CITYLAB will create the context needed to reach this objective by deploying a set of living laboratories (“living labs”) where cities and regions will work as dynamic and real life contexts for research, innovation and implementation processes for both public and private measures contributing to more efficient and sustainable urban logistics.  There are seven CITYLAB living labs, namely Brussels, London, Oslo, Paris, Rome, Rotterdam and Southampton. 

CITYLAB has seven main strategic assets and one specifically mentions MetroFreight as one of the “core academic partners that are highly qualified and endowed with strong international ties … and characterized by both strong expertise in data gathering, behavioral modelling, and policy evaluation.”

The project is organized and deployed using a two-stage living lab methodology:
Stage 1. Development and roll-out aimed at defining, testing and rolling out innovative implementations based on a core set of activities.
Stage 2. Replication and take up that explores transferability of the solutions and international cooperation in order to guarantee a wider take up, including also non-European countries such as the United States.

The CITYLAB consortium has strong links to the two VREF (Volvo Research and Educational Foundations) Centres of Excellence (CoE) on Urban Freight, and will use these networks (MetroFreight and CoE-SUFS) to spread the living lab idea to other parts of the world. Laetitia Dablanc (MetroFreight Paris) is in charge of developing the links between CITYLAB and US partners, including from MetroFreight and CoE-SUFS.