The two-day conference tackling urban futures took place in Berlin, Germany this 25-26 November. The event, hosted by Fraunhofer Institute focused on innovations, strategies and processes for the city of tomorrow, including “Morgenstadt – City of the Future” initiative; and visions and governance in the 21st century urban environment.
For the three Lighthouse projects, it was a first opportunity for the experiences gained so far to be presented for evaluation and analysis. And the audience, full of peer lighthouse and follower cities, project partners, academics and technical experts took full advantage – quizzing coordinators Damion Wagner, Gustaf Landhal and Miguel Ángel García-Fuentes on everything from job creation to evaluation of citizen participation.
The latter of these themes proved to be quite a ‘hot topic’ and was reflected in a large attendance to the communications workshop hosted by youris.com. Alongside representatives of Steinbeis Europa Zentrum and ICLEI the group discussed some of the more functional aspects of European project communications; but primarily spoke about new forms of collaboration between EU and local level communications, the importance of story telling and the difference between awareness and engagement. All this lead nicely into a discussion on citizen engagement animated using the first outputs of REMOURBAN research and evaluation on the theme and drawing on the experiences of Cologne’s “Community Reporter” schemes.
At the business end of the programme, a Grow Smarter hosted replicability session focused on city case studies from Cork, Graz and Cologne with input from expert voices including the European Investment Bank. Comparing smart city strategy development, urban planning, PPP organization and procurement between these cities is part of their drive to replicate with follow cities and a City Interest Group.
With much to choose from, attendees were also able to discuss exploitation techniques during the workshop chaired by Steinbeis Europa Zentrum and draw inspiration on a smart city global panel discussion featuring speakers from London, India and China sharing their national strategies, priorities and use of data.
REMOURBAN certainly looks forward to extending the collaboration with fellow smart city projects in 2016 and bouncing more ideas with a new wave of actors at the next edition.
2 December 2015