Day: April 26, 2019

Learning workshop and PED workshop in Vienna | April 2019

+CityxChange learning workshop and PED City workshop

After the first kick-off meeting at the project launch in Trondheim in November 2018, +CityxChange partners from LHCs, FCs and supporting organizations got together again on April 2-4 for the PED Cities Workshop.

The three-day workshop – one day organised by +CityxChange project coordinators and the second two by JPI Urban Europe – was hosted in Vienna and took place in the once forgotten warehouse which has now turned into an inspiring creativity factory, the Nordbahnhalle.

The first day of the workshop was designed as a Learning Workshop for +CityxChange partners to engage in discussions, share experiences, gain more knowledge on technical issues related to the project and understand where do we all stand in the overall project development. After the word of welcome from NTNU, a series of workshops led by work package leaders took place. The first workshop was lead by Future Analytics Consulting and issues related to city Key Performance Indicators, standardized ways to share KPI data, data governance and challenges of FCs in terms of indicators, were discussed.

Interesting results were drawn from the LHC/FC activities & demo projects workshop, were divided into thematic discussion groups, cities and partners exchanged their knowledge on PEB definitions and boundary conditions, regulatory and planning challenges, data sharing, etc. The whole discussion was led by Han Vandevyvere, included some examples of fuck-up nights and policy recommendations by similar projects to ours.

Within the last workshop, ISOCARP’s objective was to develop strong narratives about +CityxChange in each city through storytelling. After a short introduction on why storytelling is important, what are important constituents of stories and how to tell them, each group had to come up with their own storytelling version. We had an interesting presentation and later on discussion with representatives from The Energy Centre of Vienna, Nikolaus Summer and Petra Schöfmann, who presented their experiences with Positive Energy Blocks and Districts, as well as the Smart City Vienna strategy and city-industry-research cooperation in Vienna.

The second day of our stay in Vienna was led by JPI Urban Europe and was part of their workshop programme on Positive Energy Districts and Neighbourhoods (PED). Cities, R&I institutions, industry and citizens in the programme implementation came together to interact and have a solid understanding of cities’ experiences and strategies on how to manage energy transition to contribute to a more sustainable urban development.

The last day gave participants the occasion to go on a study visit to the brownfield urban development of former Vienna northwest railway station and discuss the urban development process with representatives of the City of Vienna.