Author: ISOCARP Institute

Limerick’s Georgian Neighbourhood is developing flexibly and through the use of prototyping and community participation, in close cooperation with stakeholders: citizens, companies, city administration and researchers.

Supported by the European Horizon 2020 programme and as part of the +CityxChange Project, Limerick is employing smart city development by co-creation in a public-private-people partnership bringing benefits to all stakeholders. One of the elements of this smart city development is accelerating through agile piloting – ie, ‘Urban Prototyping’.

The Urban Prototyping programme accelerates Smart City innovation by procuring new urban products and service prototypes to be co-created with citizens and wider creative networks. Solutions are tested in real life settings during a period of up to 12 months. The programme supports pilot projects and offers tools to innovate, co-create and experiment with new programmes, initiatives & changes to regulation, products and services etc. together with citizens, makers, creatives, startups and other stakeholders.

From 2019 to 2021, there will be three open calls for urban prototypes, focused on enabling the formation of a Positive Energy District in the Georgian Neighbourhood of Limerick City.

These calls are supported by the Limerick CityEngage Weeks, during which citizens engage in developing a vision for living in the historic core of Limerick City Centre. Through workshops, mapping days and events in these CityEngage weeks, stakeholders explore ways to make the transition to a positive energy neighbourhood.

The first CityEngage week was held September 23rd to 28th, 2019 and focused on the ‘Georgian Laneways’ and ‘Citizen Sensing’. During that week the +CityxChange team supported and assisted citizens in gathering information about what is valued, and to share their ideas, hopes and aspirations for the Laneways. In April and September 2020, there are further CityEngage Weeks planned in Limerick.

This Open Call will identify and support the first Urban Prototypes to be tested in the Georgian Neighbourhood and focused on developing solutions for Laneways and Citizen Sensing supports. The open call is looking for teams involving local community groups, supported by designers and makers to design, create and test solutions to common issues in the Georgian Neighbourhood area. 

For more information on the Open Call, click here to download the original file. 

On the 12^th of December 2019 at 2PM (CET), CityxChange, represented by Kieran Reeve (Limerick City and County Council), participated in the joint webinar hosted by Triangulum on “Citizen Engagement in Positive Energy Districts”. More than 30 participants, from all across Europe, joined the webinar to discuss and share experiences with citizen engagement in the different Lighthouse Cities.

Speakers and topics were:

1. May Endresen (Greater Stavanger): “How to make invisible projects visible for the citizens.  The Stavanger Triangulum story”
2. Marieke van den Weijngaard (Woonbedrijf, Eindhoven): “Tenants in Charge. Organising it digital”
3. Guest speaker from +CityXChange: Kieran Reeve (Limerick City and County Council), “Public Engagement: Do we really engage?”

In his presentation, Kieran Reeve, introduced the challenges that Limerick has with the historical building stocks in the heritage area of the city, where most of the buildings are more than 200 years old and are protected by national law. He introduced Limerick’s vision focused on – but not limited to –  creating a resilient city by increasing the use of clean energy sources; repopulating the historic city centre by making it more attractive; new Smart Community Cooperation / Participation Models across all sectors.

On public engagement, the presentation focused on reasons that motivate people to get engaged, principles of engagement and types of engagement and bringing it back to +CityxChange with a few general comments on how are we dealing with the co-creation process  within the project. A few remarks were made especially in the traditional ways of public involvement processes, where the focus is mainly on informing the citizens instead of making them part of the development process, instilling in this way a sense of ownership.

Some actions that Limerick is using to engage citizens in the participation processes within the +CityxChange project, were introduced. They range from designing a coherent social media campaign strategy, definition of clear message on what to communicate to the general public, using simple visualizations to explain complex terminology, innovative event format, providing open data platforms, etc.

If you are interested to learn more, a recording of the webinar can be found here. 

On Wednesday, the 19th of November 2019, Project Norway organized its annual Project Conference and named Powerhouse Brattørkaia  (one of our demonstration areas in Trondheim) as project of the year. The jury has listed a couple of reasons that led to Powerhouse Brattørkaia’s success. As the jury stated, the building is one of the few lighthouse projects in Norway that is pioneering with climate, energy and environmental solutions as premise for design, construction and operation. In relation to performance parameters, this technically demanding project was completed on time, under the original cost estimate and is in practice 100% leased with very positive user feedback. The jury also writes  that Powerhouse Brattørkaia is a project that demonstrates that it is possible to combine high levels of innovation, quantum leaps within a building’s environmental footprint and adhere to the classic performance goals.

This is not the first award given to Powerhouse Brattørkaia. For its efforts, Powerhouse Brattørkaia has received the BREEAM Outstanding certification, the highest possible ranking by the world’s leading sustainability assessment method for masterplanning projects, infrastructure and buildings. Its solutions support the UNFCCC Paris Agreement that pursues efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Click here to read the full article in Norwegian.

From the 6th-7th of November 2019, +CityxChange joined the NORDICZEB+, 1st Nordic Conference on zero emission and plus energy, IOP conference series: earth and environmental science.  The conference presents state-of-the-art research and practical solutions that pave the way towards a low carbon built environment, with a focus on Nordic countries.

+CityxChange presented their approach on co-creating positive energy blocks. Together with the presentation a scientific paper on the ‘Co-creation of Positive Energy Blocks’ has been submitted. The paper examined how to develop low-carbon neighbourhoods and districts, while aiming at climate-friendly and sustainable liveable urban environments. 

+CityxChange‘s second newsletter has been distributed in November 2019. Please feel welcome to read the newsletter online here and distribute in your networks. This month’s newsletter contains the most important news and updates of the last three months from our project and it also includes other news related to our project partners and other SC001 projects and events. 

Further, we want to invite you to subscribe to the newsletters to not miss any project updates:

From the 25^th – 26^th of October, our lighthouse cities, Trondheim and Limerick, participated on the Global Climathon day. Such events aim at bringing together citizens, cities and local economies to develop local solutions to climate challenges. Both cities invited their citizens to join and cooperate with like-minded people who want to have an impact on finding new ways to help the city transition to achieve more sustainable urban ecosystems and lower their carbon footprint. 

As part of +CityxChange, Space Engagers hosted the first Limerick Climathon focusing on climate challenges faced by Limerick city. The event generated a lot of interest and innovative ideas by bringing together +CityxChange partners, university students, entrepreneurs, local government and community groups who worked in teams to develop solutions. One of the key successes of the Climathon was the co-design experience embedded in the event structure, something we hope to repeat next year. The contributions of +CityxChange partners including Limerick City and County Council, the University of Limerick, Future Analytics Consulting, Integrated Environmental Solutions, GKinetic, and Smart MPower, as well as Trondheim +CityxChange project manager, Dirk Ahlers, contributed strongly to the collaborative nature of the Limerick Climathon. The winning team, ReStory, will receive supports to develop an online portal for sharing stories on underused buildings and how to bring them back into use.

The city challenge of this year’s Climathon for Trondheim was: Citizens in Positive Energy Districts. 26 participants from 13 different countries joined Climathon Trondheim 2019. In 24 hours, they learned about the complexity of this year’s city challenge, were formed into 6 teams, talked to various mentors, got tips on pitching and design thinking and even tried some Bollywood dance. At final pitch, each team got 5 minutes to present their ideas to the jury. The winners are Nabosol (co-sharing and crowdfunding platform for solar panel installations), Co-using (community housing, a shared work and living space to reduce the climate impact from the building sector) and WeCare (the League of Energy with neighbourhoods). Click to view the program.