On the 5th, the 6th and the 7th of July city representatives of Enschede’s partner cities visited Twente for the Smart City Conference and fulfil the position of challenge provider in the international Creathon on Smart Civic Participation. This conference was the first step towards a shared agenda to steer the themes and actions of the international Smart City Alliance for the upcoming years, between Enschede’s partner cities: Dalian (China), Heidelberg (Germany), Linköping (Sweden), Münster (Germany) and Palo Alto (USA). Part of this conference was the Creathon, where 30 young talented international orientated students of 12 different nationalities, were chosen to participate. The Creathon is a multi-day event in which these young talents work together in teams to develop solutions for predefined challenges. Each partner city introduced a best practice of their city based on smart civic participation as a challenge. The challenge of the Creathon? Turning the best practice into a scalable business opportunity.
Enschede: G1000Enschede
G1000 is a consultation meeting of ordinary citizens (1000 of them) on issues they consider important for politics. The main question: how do we, as citizens from the city Enschede, dealing with fireworks in the future?
Dalian: China’s aging population
China is entering an aging society, together with disabled children or “unaccompanied” families (the families who lost their only child) will lead to a series of family problems and social problems. We use the smart city program to provide effective help for this group.
Heidelberg: Get the mayor
With #GetTheMayor citizens (and everyone passionate about Heidelberg) get the opportunity to get involved and engaged with their local government. How? By giving everyone the chance to influence the mayor of Heidelberg’s weekly schedule and have him visit a place of their choice in order to put the cities focus on the issues and projects concerning Heidelberg they are most passionate about!
Münster: Participatory budgeting
Participatory Budgeting is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget.
Linköping: Vallastaden
1000 new homes, new innovations regarding waste management, electricity and mobile broadband as well as a multistory car park with solar cells on the roof and lots of energy chargers. Our future need is amongst other needs connected to transportation – and how deliveries of food and medicine will work. A few words about a future innovation environment in Linköping combining housing and offices, called Ebbepark.
Palo Alto: App’s challenge
The challenge is a way to engage a wide range of people in thinking about and developing solutions around the theme of civic engagement. The solutions should be specifically geared to work on smartphones as apps.
Let’s get social