Tag: Trondheim

Exploring and sharing ways towards citizen-led energy transitions

Posted on October 25, 2019 by - Cities, News

During our second +CityxChange Consortium Meeting in Limerick, we organised a storytelling workshop with the objective to exchange knowledge and best practices internally and externally on how to involve citizens effectively. The workshop was facilitated by Limerick County and City Council and ISOCARP Institute and took place in the Fab Lab Limerick – a collaborative space to engage, produce, and co-create.

The workshop was attended by 31 project representatives, three international speakers (online) as well as local residents from the demonstration areas of Limerick. The workshop aimed at exploring ways of creating a better understanding of the experiences, challenges, failures and successes of similar projects in engaging citizens as well as fostering interactive and progressive exchanges between external participants and the +CityxChange team. As overarching problem statements, three key questions were formulated:

  1. What techniques/tools/approaches are effective to inform citizens about energy-related concepts, projects, and necessary technical/financial details?
  2. How can effective collaboration between a representative group of the society and projects/cities be achieved? Which methods work; which do not? How to reach out to those who are usually not involved?
  3. How do behavioural changes evolve? What does it take to reach a community-driven process in which citizens take the leading role and become proactive prosumers?

With this starting point, the first part of the workshop was dedicated to learning from other projects and individuals working on similar challenges. Muriël Pels, advisor for international cooperation and EU funding affairs (H2020) at Municipality Utrecht and project partner of +CityxChange’s sister project IRIS presented the approach, challenges and successes in generating support from the residents in IRIS’ demonstration area in Utrecht. Ariane Lelieveld, one of the initiators of Blijstroom in Rotterdam, presented the motivation, and ups and downs of the solely community-run project in Rotterdam. Lastly, John W. Lee, the community representative of Tallaght, a community outside of Dublin, shared his story how to collectively transform their community into a more sustainable and energy-neutral one.

Afterwards, the three external speakers discussed the three above-mentioned questions with smaller groups, accompanied by a collaborative brainstorming on best practices, learned lessons, and promising approaches. A compilation of the results and a detailed overview will be published on our project website soon. If you have questions or comments, please contact us.

Tartu and Trondheim to share experiences as two Lighthouse Cities

Posted on September 18, 2019 by - News

Representatives from the City of Tartu visited Trondheim from 4th to 5th September. The first day was sharing experiences of the cities, while the second day focused on the experiences as being European Lighthouse Cities, together with the +CityxChange coordinator at NTNU. This part shared experiences from the two Smart City EU projects SmartenCity, Tartu, and +CityxChange, Trondheim and NTNU. Approaches of both projects were discussed and linked to larger city challenges.

Also the SFI ZEN was present and presented their work with zero emission neighborhoods in Norway.
We look forward to keeping contact and to continue to share from our ongoing work for better sustainable cities.

 

 

+CityxChange in the 55th ISOCARP World Planning Congress in Jakarta/Bogor, Indonesia

Posted on September 15, 2019 by - News

+CityxChange was present in the 55th World Planning Congress in Jakarta/Bogor, Indonesia which was held by one of our partner organisations, ISOCARP. 

The main topic of the World Planning Congress was ‘Beyond the Metropolis’. In five intensive days, from the 9th-13th of September 2019, topics related to a rapid urbanisation as a result of a globalising economy in metropolitan areas have been treated. Divided in seven different tracks, where ‘Smart futures and sustainability’ was one of them, issues related to urban planning and development strategies to promote liveability, well-being, sustainability, innovation and responsive governance for their dwellers, were tackled. 

+CityxChange attracted the attention of many academics and professionals working in the field, while being represented in the ISOCARP booth with its own stand alone banner. In addition to this, an introduction to +CityxChange was given by the project manager of our partner organisation, Tjark Gall, during the plennary session of ISOCARP Institute. 

Powerhouse Brattørkaia official opening

Posted on September 11, 2019 by - News

Powerhouse Brattørkaia, one of our demonstration areas which is also the biggest new energy-block in Norway, has officially been launched on the 30th of August, 2019.

On the 30th of August, +CityxChange, celebrated the official opening of Powerhouse Brattørkaia (Trondhein) which is the biggest new positive energy block in Norway. It will generate more energy in its operational phase than it consumes through the production of building materials, construction, operation and disposal of the building. For Powerhouse Brattørkaia, form follows environment, while optimal use of solar energy determines the building’s exciting and iconic architecture. Solar energy, other sources of renewable energy, and an extremely low energy consumption ensure that this becomes an energy-positive building.

The official opening attracted participants from private, public, university and research organisations. Several partners in this huge project, such as +CityxChange, ZEN, IOTA, Trønder Energi, etc., participated with stands open for all public.

Among the other groups engaged in festival were young people working in climate -related issues – Klimabrølet Trondheim – Climate Roar. Entra CEO Sonja Horn and Secretary of the Department of Commerce Torbjørn Røe officially connected the powerhouse, with smoke and el-guitar solo effects to celebrate the grand opening.

Stalls with activities for different age groups were made available. Among others, an electric car, electric boat and an electric bus that can be charged with solar cells from Powerhouse, were showcased.

Click here to learn more about Powerhouse projects.

Futurum Exhibition on The City of the Future at the NTNU Big Challenge Science Festival

Posted on August 28, 2019 by - News

+CityxChange has participated with a booth on “Smart Energy Positive Cities” at the Futurum Science Exhibition. The project participated in a joint exhibition on the topic of Future Cities together with the FME ZEN project on Zero Emission City Districts, also coordinated by NTNU.

The joint booth allowed us to show the individual overall project goals, but also demonstrate to the local public the interventions along Trondheim’s Knowledge Axis, including the areas of Brattøra, Gløshaugen Campus, and Sluppen. 

The Futurum exhibition is part of the NTNU Big Challenge Science Festival, from 16 to 19 June 2019. It presents challenges within the topics of: Food of the Future, Sustainable Lifestyle, The City of the Future, and Climate Changes and Energy Systems. It was targeted at children and youth, visitors and citizens of all ages from the whole city and region.

There were various stands which engaged participation from the public and especially children. Monday 17th to Wednesday 19th children and school classes were specially invited. During the whole exhibit, concerts and talks were held in the concert hall as part of Big Challenge. Aside many international and national speakers, +CityxChange coordinator Annemie Wyckmans talked about “Empowering people in smart sustainable cities”.

The +CityxChange stand presented the overall project and the specific demonstrations in Trondheim, and what it would mean for the involved cities. It showed a large-scale interactive digital map, posters, and videos. These included interviews of local partners and young citizens of Trondheim and an animation of the growth of Positive Energy Blocks as the main innovation of +CityxChange. School classes were specifically invited to the exhibition, and the projects held special interaction sessions for children to develop their wishes for the future city. Master students from NTNU assisted in the stand and worked throughout the whole festival.

Check out the Full Programme.

 

Report on Enabling Regulatory Mechanism to Trial Innovation in Cities

Posted on August 23, 2019 by - News

The report on “Enabling Regulatory Mechanism to Trial Innovation in Cities”from our Lighthouse City Trondheim is now available on the +CityxChange website in the Knowledge Base, together with all public deliverables. The report investigates and analyses how EU legislations and national regulations influence the process of establishing positive energy blocks (PEBs), positive energy districts (PEDs) and community grid systems – and how they could be processed and operated within the framework of a local energy market.

Read and download the full report today.

Click here to download the presentation. 

 

Citizen Participation in Co-creation | June 2019

Posted on August 8, 2019 by - News

From governance in ‘Campus development’ to governance in ‘Smart cities’ – Savis Gohari

On the 21st of June, 2019, our new colleague, Savis Gohari, gave a presentation on governance processes on smart city initiatives, linking in this way her PhD research (Governance in the planning and decision-making process: The co-location case of university campuses in Trondheim, Norway) to +CityxChange project.  

Accordingly, the research objective was to analyse ‘governance structures’, i.e. the way actors stand in a network and interact with each other across levels, together with ‘governance processes’, i.e. the interrelation between actors’ attributes (such as interests, resource, power and roles) at different levels and rounds of decision-making. Part of the empirical research was conducted in one of the +CityxChange Demonstration Areas in Trondheim, namely, Campus Gløshaugen. Citizen participation is one of the main pillars upon which +CityxChange is based on. However, participatory processes remain a complex task, especially when trying to transit to new forms of policy-making in a smart city context.

Savis’ discussion on how to govern ‘smart cities’ pointed out that the formal mechanisms of transitioning to sustainability are ill equipped to address and conform with the political and power dimensions in smart cities. Furthermore, there is no determined blueprint for sustainability transitions and the existing governance systems hitherto have been inefficient and implicated in unsustainability.

During her work as a postdoc which is directly linked to research on citizen participatory processes for +CityxChange, Savis will try to conceptualise the co-creative governance and the dynamic interplay between power relations in the face of conflict of interests. Thereby, she aims to go beyond the traditional division of governance network between private, public and academia to investigate the political structure underpinning the functionality of governance.

Click here to download the presentation.

ERRIN Smart Cities Working Group Meeting, Brussels

Posted on May 16, 2019 by - Cities, News

ERRIN (European Regions Research and Innovation Network) had invited for a workshop of their Smart Cities Working Group around the key topics of the two new Lighthouse Projects, titled Smart Cities WG Meeting: Latest developments on PEDs and the future of Smart Cities.

As the main contribution, the two new Lighthouse Projects funded through the H2020 SCC1 calls for 2018 were presented. Both +CityxChange and MAKING-CITY presented their project with presentations from their respective coordinators and cities. For +CityxChange, the Project Manager from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the Lighthouse City Manager for Trondheim Municipality held a joint presentation, titled +CityxChange – Developing a Lighthouse Project for Positive Energy Districts, on the approaches of the project and the background and motivation for the application process, highlighting the city needs, co-creation of a project proposal, and implications for collaboration. MAKING-CITY was represented by its Project Coordinator CARTIF, the Lighthouse City of Groningen, and the Follower City of Bassano del Grappa.

There were four breakout discussion sessions on the topics of PEB/PEDs, Citizen Engagement, Follower cities, and Scaling up, financing and dissemination. The PEB/PED sessions were co-moderated by CARTIF and NTNU, the Citizen Engagement sessions were co-moderated by the City of Groningen and Trondheim Municipality.

The details and the presentations are available from the event page.

Learning workshop and PED workshop in Vienna | April 2019

Posted on April 26, 2019 by - News

+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.