Luxembourg’s Belval campus to become smart city living lab

A new EU-backed project is aiming to transform Luxembourg's Belval campus into a smart city living lab using advanced digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence.

The SmartSpires initiative, with a budget of EUR €3.1 million co-funded through the European Union's Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), is coordinated by a consortium consisting of Gcore, 5SKYE, the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), and Orange Luxembourg.

The project is designed to demonstrate how the integration of 5G connectivity, edge computing, and Internet of Things (IoT) technology can support safer, cleaner, and more efficient urban living for both residents and local authorities.

SmartSpires will run over three years and aims to provide a replicable model for smart city infrastructure across Europe, initially concentrating efforts on the Belval campus before exploring possible expansion into other urban environments.

Central to the project is the deployment of at least three smart towers across Belval. These towers will be equipped with densified 5G connectivity for advanced networking, edge computing resources to support local AI applications, IoT sensors to monitor and interact with environmental and urban factors, and various local add-ons tailored to specific urban needs.

The smart towers are intended to operate as the backbone for a range of real-time, data-intensive applications that enhance urban services. By placing connectivity, computing, and edge intelligence within a single infrastructure, the initiative will support on-site data processing, reduce latency, optimise energy use, and strengthen data governance through local handling of sensitive information.

This methodology also allows for entirely new classes of urban applications—those which require high-speed responses and transmit large amounts of data—that are often impractical with centralised, cloud-based systems due to communication delays and bandwidth limitations.

Four primary smart city use cases are being defined for the initial deployment phase. These scenarios, currently under development with the input of stakeholders such as Fonds Belval and Agora, are being specified through ongoing discussions about infrastructure roll-out, with additional plans to consult local communes on alignment with community needs.

LIST will operate a Smart City Living Lab at Belval, offering an experimental platform to test and scale new urban solutions built upon 5G networks.

In addition to the core use case under the Living Lab, three more applications will directly leverage the smart towers. The first involves mobility services, which will use 5G and edge computing to improve public transportation and traffic management. A second application, crowd analytics, aims to enhance public safety and city planning by analysing real-time patterns of people and vehicle movement. The third use case focuses on waste management by combining IoT sensors and local data processing to optimise refuse collection and advance recycling efforts.

Development of these use cases will entail broad collaboration, with input from local residents, startups, and researchers. This multi-layered engagement is central to producing benefits tailored to Belval and its surroundings and is also expected to inform similar initiatives in other cities across Europe.

Elisabeth Margue, Luxembourg Minister Delegate to the Prime Minister for Media and Connectivity, said: "The launch of SmartSpires is a significant milestone in Luxembourg's digital transformation journey. This initiative transforms Belval into a living laboratory for the smart cities of the future by integrating cutting-edge 5G connectivity, peripheral computing, and AI. While the project involves testing technologies, its true purpose is more about improving lives, enhancing sustainability, and shaping how cities across Europe can evolve in a more intelligent and responsive way. I am thrilled that Luxembourg is at the forefront of this digital innovation, thanks to the EU's support and the strong public-private collaboration."

The SmartSpires consortium brings together four organisations in distinct roles. 5SKYE is responsible for deploying and maintaining multifunctional smart infrastructure, including densified 5G, mini edge computing capability, digital signage, and AI-based CCTV analytics. Gcore is acting as Project Coordinator, leading both project management and edge infrastructure deployment.

LIST serves as Technical Coordinator, handling technical design, operationalisation, and evaluation of use cases, as well as supervising the operation of the Belval Smart City Living Lab. Orange Luxembourg supplies the 5G network backbone for the entire project.

Although the initiative is initially centred on Belval, the consortium's objective is to demonstrate scalable and efficient digital infrastructure models that can support smarter, more connected communities across Europe.