Once again, the Office for Economic Development and the team from Smart City Research (TU Dresden) presented their projects at the world's largest trade fair for Smart-City developments.
For over 10 years, the "Smart City Expo World Congress" has been bringing together leading representatives of the most innovative companies, governments and organizations. This year, from November 4-6, 27,000 people, over 1,000 exhibitors and representatives from 138 countries attended to share their projects and find solutions to make cities more sustainable, efficient and livable.
The Office for Economic Development of the City of Dresden was a partner of a joint stand at which nine Saxon companies and municipalities exhibited their projects under the umbrella of Wirtschaftsförderung Sachsen GmbH. Dresden's EU projects "Mobilities" and "NeutralPath" met with great interest from visitors. In a panel discussion on the topic of "Digital Twins for Climate-Neutral Cities: PEDs in Action Across Europe", Luke Bojcev shared experiences from the "NeutralPath" project with representatives from international projects.
Saxony's Economics Minister Dirk Panter also visited the stand. Steffen Rietzschel, Head of the Office for Economic Development of the city of Dresden: "The participation of the Smart City Dresden team in Barcelona is clear proof of the innovative strength of the location - with appeal far beyond the city limits. Our projects combine economic development with sustainable urban design and are breaking new ground in some areas. It is therefore important to learn from each other as a network with other international projects and to work together on sustainable solutions for the cities of tomorrow."
WISSENSARCHITEKTUR - Laboratory of Knowledge Architecture (TU Dresden), which is leading the accompanying and synthesis research of the model project Smart City Dresden (Smart City Research), networked with partners from Hamburg at a stand. They presented their projects under the motto "Digital Partners for urban resilience".
Jörg Rainer Noennig, Head of WISSENSARCHITEKTUR and Professor of Digital City Science at the HafenCity-Universität Hamburg (HCU), resilience is one of the most important aspects of Smart City . Natural and man-made disasters repeatedly put urban societies under shock. According to Noennig in his stage talk, intelligent cities with smarten technologies not only have the ability to react faster and better to crises, they can even learn from them ("Crisis as a Resource") and ultimately emerge stronger from them.
Dr. Paul Stadelhofer (WISSENSARCHITEKTUR) invited participants to a "crash course Smart-City- strategy development". He also gave an insight into the model developed by the research team for analyzing the impact of Smart-City projects. It relates consensus-based indicators from Smart-City guideline documents in order to describe impact and identify optimization potential. In addition, WISSENSARCHITEKTUR is working with the federal association Smart City on a systematic terminology of Smart-City terms.
Participation in the Smart City Expo World Congress was a great success for participants from Dresden. The contact with other municipalities resulted in valuable networking opportunities on current international innovation approaches and their transferability and practical feasibility in Germany. The strengthening of European partnerships enables an in-depth exchange on new cooperation options, particularly in the context of existing and future EU funding programs. Specific technical impulses on topics and technologies that are currently being driven forward particularly strongly across Europe can become strategically relevant for Dresden in order to further develop its own innovation processes in a targeted manner.
