CIVITY BV

Their core work

CIVITY BV is a Dutch smart city consultancy and platform company that helps municipalities and urban authorities design, finance, and scale data-driven city services. Their work sits at the intersection of urban governance, business modelling for city innovation platforms, and citizen co-creation — they translate complex city challenges into deployable service models. In IRIS they contributed smart city platform architecture and business model development for sustainable urban services including energy efficiency and electric mobility. In SCOREwater they shifted toward urban water resilience, working on data market models and organisational frameworks for managing flooding and drainage systems.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their earliest H2020 work (IRIS, from 2017), CIVITY focused on the broad smart city agenda: integrating renewable energy, electric mobility, energy storage, and citizen co-creation within city innovation platform frameworks. By their second project (SCOREwater, 2019), the focus had sharpened considerably toward urban water infrastructure — drainage resilience, flooding risk, and what they call 'sewer sociology', meaning the organisational and behavioural dimensions of managing water systems. The addition of 'data market' and 'open platform' in the later period suggests they are also moving toward the commercialisation and governance layer of smart city data, not just service delivery.

CIVITY appears to be narrowing from broad smart city consulting toward a specialisation in climate-resilient urban infrastructure — particularly water systems — combined with data market models that could monetise city sensor networks.

How they like to work

CIVITY has participated exclusively as a consortium partner, never as coordinator, across both projects — suggesting they prefer to contribute specialist expertise within larger programmes rather than lead them. Their network of 70 unique partners from 2 projects implies they join large, multi-city demonstration consortia (around 35 partners per project on average), typical of Horizon 2020 Innovation Actions. This profile fits an organisation that brings niche consultancy value — business modelling, organisational science, platform design — into consortia led by municipalities or research universities.

CIVITY has built a network of 70 unique consortium partners across 10 countries through just 2 projects, indicating broad European exposure relative to their portfolio size. Their participation in large urban Innovation Actions means they have likely worked alongside major city authorities, utilities, and research institutes across Northwestern and Southern Europe.

What sets them apart

CIVITY occupies a rare niche as a private SME specialising in the organisational and business-model side of smart city infrastructure — not the technology itself, but how cities adopt, finance, and sustain it. The term 'sewer sociology' in their SCOREwater profile is a telling signal: they bring social science and organisational thinking into engineering-dominated water infrastructure projects, which most technical partners cannot offer. For a consortium building a smart city or climate resilience project, CIVITY fills the gap between technology deployment and real-world urban adoption.

Highlights from their portfolio

• SCOREwater
  Their largest funded project (EUR 586,688) and their most focused work — combining urban drainage engineering with data markets and organisational science, reflecting a mature and differentiated smart city water resilience capability.
• IRIS
  A flagship Horizon 2020 smart city Innovation Action covering energy, mobility, and citizen co-creation, giving CIVITY credibility across the full urban sustainability agenda early in their EU project history.