It is all about turning this planet
into something B

Our blockchain mission

“Blockchain is not the intrusive person that the common internet apps are to our phones. It is rather a collection of useful, private, and decentralised handy tools that will empower you and your community of choice”.

 

 

 

 

 

Lluïsa Marsal, founder and president of Intelligent'ER RE'Development
Get to know the

Leading Expert

Lluisa Marsal Llacuna is an Architect (2001) with two Masters (2004, 2011) and two Doctorates (2008, 2013) in the fields of urban planning and applied ICT. She worked in the private sector as Technology and Standards lead at Centre Blockchain de Catalunya (CBCat), Cambra de Comerç de Barcelona. Previously, she worked for governments in the UK and in Catalunya as smart cities and technology consultant, for Innovate UK and at Government’s of Catalonia Catalan Institute of Energy. Before working for public administrations, she spent fifteen years in the academia, in different research and leadership roles in public universities. Her academic career includes the creation and direction of world’s first official scientific master’s program in smart cities; several competitive and commercial research projects in the domains of smart and sustainable cities; postdoc scholarships in Germany (2006) and the USA (2011); a US patent on urban planning standards technology; and, the publication as main author of about twenty papers in top peer-reviewed academic journals. She served as UN Habitat III expert and she held two mandates as a chair at UN’s U4SSC initiative, with her second term focused on exploring blockchain applications for cities. She has been involved in standardisation activities since 2010, participating in different committees in UNE, CEN-Cenelec, ISO, IEC and ITU. She is and has served as reviewer and rapporteur in competitive EU calls within the FP7, H2020 and Horizon Europe programmes. She is accredited as EU research programmes assessor by ACCIÓ, Catalonia’s Innovation Agency.



At the intersection of smart cities and blockchain technology

Blockchain4Cities

Dr Marsal is a Blockchain for Cities pioneer. She championed the inclusion of the first ever teaching programme on blockchain dedicated to cities and communities in different university master’s programmes and other scholar training courses.  First editions of the course include:

· Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, January 2018
· Blockchain Catalunya Association, June 2018 
· International Summer School, Pompeu Fabra University, July 2018
· Association of Civil Engineers of Catalonia, December 2018

The following publications give you a sense of couse’s contents:

· Cryptourbanomics: a method to boost urban sustainability with blockchain technology MARSAL (2021), Sustainability 13 (5), 2438

· The People’s Smart City Dashboard (PSCD): delivering on bottom-up governance with blockchain
MARSAL (2020), Technological Forecasting and Social Change 158, September 2020, 120150, Special Issue on Blockchain Technology and Management

· Future Living Framework: Is blockchain the next enabling network? MARSAL (2018), Technological Forecasting and Social Change 128, 226-234

· The Standards Revolution: Who will first put this new kid on the blockchain? MARSAL (2018), Proceedings ITU-Kaleidoscope2017 IEEE Xplorer

Discovery workshop

Furthermore, in our mission to support intelligent development, at Intelligent’ER we also elaborated a pioneering training programme to help cities and communities incorporate the blockchain technology in their processes. This is a first-of-its-kind blockchain programme for cities.

Many blockchain projects overlook what is important and try to innovate on the technology itself by incrementally enhancing blockchain applications with, for instance, machine learning algorithms. This only leads to small improvements. 

Conscious of this complimentary non-technological outlook, our training programme also considers factors such as efficiencies, the human condition, scalability and replication, among other social elements.

The Blockchain4Cities programme is formed of two modules, Training and Mentoring. The first module on Training is a methodology for the creation of blockchain-based urban projects, including its programming specifications. The second module on Mentoring is a ready-to-market methodology in collaboration with local businesses to implement the previously created blockchain-based projects.

All our workshops and trainings are hands-on and thus participants learn how to use a few

programmable blockchain tools: