HOJE-TAASTRUP KOMMUNE

Their core work

Høje-Taastrup Kommune is a Danish municipality in the Greater Copenhagen area that serves as a living laboratory for urban sustainability innovations. The municipality brings real urban governance challenges — district heating networks, social housing neighbourhoods, and construction waste streams — into EU-funded innovation actions, providing regulatory access, citizen populations, and municipal infrastructure for large-scale demonstrations. Their role is to test and implement solutions at city level: deploying low-temperature district heating, co-creating healthy public corridors with residents, and piloting circular material flows for construction and organic waste.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Høje-Taastrup's H2020 journey shows a clear shift from technical infrastructure to people-centred urban transformation. Their earliest project (COOL DH, 2017) focused squarely on energy hardware — district heating, renewables, energy efficiency. By 2018-2019, their focus broadened dramatically into social dimensions: democratic innovation, active citizenship, wellbeing, healthy corridors, and circular economy. This evolution reflects a municipality that moved from deploying green infrastructure to rethinking how citizens participate in shaping sustainable cities.

Moving toward integrated urban governance that combines circular economy, citizen co-creation, and social wellbeing — expect future interest in nature-based solutions and just green transitions.

How they like to work

Høje-Taastrup operates exclusively as a participant, never as coordinator — typical for municipalities that contribute real-world demonstration sites rather than project management capacity. With 70 unique partners across just 3 projects, they work in large Innovation Action consortia (averaging 23+ partners per project). This makes them an accessible, low-friction partner: experienced in multi-country consortia, comfortable with their role as a city pilot site, and unlikely to compete for coordination.

Despite only three projects, their network spans 70 partners across 15 countries, reflecting participation in large pan-European Innovation Actions. This gives them connections across Southern and Northern Europe, particularly with other demonstration cities and urban research groups.

What sets them apart

As a mid-sized Danish municipality in the Copenhagen metropolitan area, Høje-Taastrup offers a practical, well-governed Nordic urban testbed — large enough for meaningful demonstrations but small enough for manageable pilot projects. Their combination of district heating infrastructure, social housing stock, and active circular economy pilots makes them a triple-threat demonstration site. For consortium builders, they bring something academics and companies cannot: municipal authority, real citizens, and the regulatory power to actually implement what gets tested.

Highlights from their portfolio

• URBiNAT
  Largest funding share (EUR 497k) and most ambitious scope — co-creating healthy corridors in social housing neighbourhoods, blending urban design with democratic innovation.
• CityLoops
  Targets a highly practical challenge — closing urban material loops for construction waste and organic waste — with direct municipal procurement implications.