Smart Cities on the Rise

Cities take their innovation into their own hands! 

Three online hackathons in a row, tackling different aspects of urban life at different cities scales, show us how smart cities will be developed locally, by and for their inhabitants, with Open Data as raw material for reflection and solutions.

The first hackathon, Smart City lab Lenzburg, will take place online on the 13^th and 14^th of November 2020 and is strongly anchored in the local community and it will tackle questions specific to Lenzburg: for example after a new 2000W neighbourhood was build, the following questions arose: How to optimize this new way of urban living? Which lessons can we learn? Which solutions could be adopted by the rest of the city? Another challenge will be how to reunite the different parts of Lenzburg, which were cut up by the train tracks and the highway at different moments of its historical development? Could optimizing public transport to the different neighborhoods be part of the solution? Or making initiatives and activities in different parts of the city more visible to the rest of Lenzburg? Questions also arise from the side of the city administration and services, and from the energy provider. Solutions might be digital or not, but while their starting point is local, the solutions might concern us all.

Shortly after, on the 27^th and 28^th of November the Shape my City – Open Data Hackdays, organized for the second year by the students of the master’s degree course in Applied Information and Data Science of the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts, will also take place online. For this larger touristic and academic city, one of the focuses will be to understand the needs of the different types of inhabitants, users, visitors and stakeholders of the city. How can we shape the interaction for better communication and services? And how can we incentivise behavioural changes for a more harmonious and sustainable city life? The other topics revolve around exploring the potential of the urban fabric for energy production, climate change mitigation and here too, the model role of 2000W neighborhoods.

Then, also online on the 29^th & 30^th April 2021, the Energy and Climate Hacks will be held as a parallel event to the Decarbonizing Cities Conference. During this event, smart urban living will be addressed through the lens of energy efficiency not only in Bern but also in some british cities, throwing a bridge between common issues and needs across borders.

The beauty of this series of events is not only that it will allow us to go deeper in the development of solutions, but also that it exemplifies how bottom-up locally embedded initiatives actually tackle global issues and how those proposals, tested at a local scale, might help our society beyond their original purpose.

These events are open and free of charge, like all our other hackdays, so take part, you too have a take on how our future smart cities should be!

Smart City lab Lenzburg 13^th and 14^th of November 2020
Shape my City – Open Data Hackdays 27^th and 28^th of November 2020
Energy and Climate Hacks 29^th & 30^th April 2021