Lighthouse project

A lighthouse project is grant-funding jargon for a demonstrator. A handful of cities build an ambitious, district-scale package — deep building retrofits, local renewables, shared mobility, a data platform — in public and at real scale, so that 'follower' or 'fellow' cities can copy the parts that fit them. The European Commission ran 18 of these under Horizon 2020 with around €345 million, pairing 48 lighthouse cities with 72 followers.

The money buys a working example instead of a study, which is why the results are unusually well documented. Stockholm's GrowSmarter retrofitted three 1960s blocks in Årsta and demonstrated twelve solutions between 2015 and 2019. Munich's Smarter Together was one of three lighthouse cities alongside Lyon and Vienna, and its mobility stations, smart lampposts and data platform outlived the grant. Trondheim's +CityxChange built Positive Energy Blocks and a local market to trade their surplus.

The model funds the demonstration, not the maintenance. Several entries in this atlas ended cleanly when their funding did — Copenhagen's EnergyLab Nordhavn in 2019, Helsinki's Sohjoa shuttles the same year — and that is not failure: a demonstrator that finishes on schedule is a completed experiment, much like a Reallabor. The failure mode is a city that mistakes it for an operating service and budgets nothing to keep it running. The wider gap is replication, the step that most often does not happen, because follower cities rarely inherit the financing that made the demonstration possible.