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The Intelligent Cities Challenge (ICC) is one of the European Commission’s largest city support initiatives supporting European cities in their green and digital transitions. ICC delivers knowledge and support services to cities and their local economies to address two major challenges: making the transition to a net-zero economic model, while enabling social inclusion and sustainable development for every EU citizen.

Cities learn how to address these challenges through Local Green Deals: integrated, multi-disciplinary action plans to lead the green and digital transition across sectors from the built environment, urban mobility and renewable energy systems to tourism or small retailers. Cities become members of a vibrant network, gain access to advisory services, innovation and sustainability management techniques, cutting-edge technology and training and get inspiration and advice from peers and mentor cities.

Building on the success of the previous edition of the ICC programme (2020-22) and Digital Cities Challenge (2017-19), the ICC will now enter Phase 2!

Amsterdam as a Mentor City

Like previous years, Amsterdam has been selected to join the support programme as a mentor city. The city will play a leading support role by guiding the 64 core cities as they embark on their two year journey to create impactful strategies and develop innovative solutions that will place the cities at the forefront of the green and digital twin transition through Local Green Deals. A nice compliment, allowing the Amsterdam Region to share their experiences and learnings from setting up Local Green Deal initiatives over the past years.

The Intelligent Cities Challenge Strategy City Lab: Accelerating the Twin Transition (November 2023)

On 23 and 24 November 2023, over 200 people - a mix of Intelligent Cities Challenge (ICC) core and mentor cities, political leaders and representatives from European institutions gathered for the first time in-person to discuss the status quo of Twin Transition. Through examples and best practices, attendees had the honour to hear from over 30 speakers as they shared insights into collaboration methods, Local Green Deals, climate ambitions, digital transitions and more across the course of 20 sessions.

Amsterdam Smart CIty's Leonie van den Beuken travelled to this gathering in Brussels as one of the representatives of the Amsterdam Region. She summarized her trip as follows:

This EU program helps cities from north to south, east and west to connect, share and learn. A much needed interaction, as we all try to improve the quality of life of our citizens. We all struggle with the ever rising cost of living. And we all want to get our cities to become more sustainable.

None of this comes easy, but we all know that local collaboration plays a key role. Building local coalitions between government, businesses and citizens is one thing, but how do we make sure these so called coalitions of the willing actually become coalitions of the doing?

Some of the learnings we shared from the Amsterdam Region are; the need for political support and the importance of trust and respect.

• Local political leadership will inspire and guide society and entrepreneurs to invest and contribute. However, make sure pilotical support doesn’t evolve into political ownership. When that happens, societal parties and businesses tend to step out the coalition.

• Take the importance of trust and respect seriously. You need to show long term commitment, take time to create understanding between parties. Take competition between participating SME’s serious and define together how to handle this together. Create a workflow in which smaller parties are allowed to participate less intense but sill feel incorporated.

We'll keep you up to date on our participation in future gatherings and results from ICC Phase 2. Want to know more? Check https://www.intelligentcitieschallenge.eu/

Hello all,
I am proudly sharing and same time invite you for visiting my exhibition at the Dutch Design Week #ddw20. My Final Master Project is selected as a part of Drivers of Change under the categories of sustainable future hosted by the Technical University of Eindhoven.

My project is a cross-faculty project at the Department of Industrial Design and Building Services Research Group at TU/e. I designed and programmed a smart user interface for a personal cooling system, which not only collects data in real-time for the development of machine learning models, but also creates an easy and intuitive way for users to achieve a comfortable thermal climate. This graduation project scored an 8 as a result.

Thanks to the industry and academia for their recognition and support of my graduation project, with special thanks and respect to my graduation mentor Professor Mr Loe Feijs.

The #ddw2020 shall be online and free of charge!
SEE YOU ALL THERE.
https://ddwtue.nl/projects/the-cooling-stat/

Amsterdam Smart City (ASC) and Amsterdam University of Applied Science (AUSA) have teamed up with Insper to develop a course focused on transferring the Amsterdam smart city approach to the Brazilian context. The course is designed to introduce Brazilian urban and smart city professionals to collaborative innovation and governance topics. The course will enable participants to understand the possibilities of technical innovations for the benefit of a liveable city as well as the socio-economic preconditions that make these projects possible. Participants will better understand technological trends, discover opportunities for metropolitan improvements and learn how to organize and scale up smart city projects.

Course Overview:
· Dates & time: Nov 17, Nov 19, Nov 24, Nov 26, Dec 1, Dec 3 from 9:00-11:00 BRT / 13:00-15:00 CET
· Assignment: participants will work on an assignment that will apply the concepts from the course to a Brazilian case study
· Discount: organizations which enrol two employee will benefit from a 50% discount for the second registration

For more information and to apply visit: https://www.insper.edu.br/cursos-online/smart-city-transferring-the-amsterdam-approach-to-the-brazillian-context/

The cities of Helsinki and Amsterdam have worked together to each launch a first-of-its-kind Artificial Intelligence Register.

“Together with the city of Helsinki, we are on a mission to create as much understanding about algorithms as possible and be transparent about the way we – as cities – use them,” commented Touria Meliani, Deputy Mayor of Amsterdam (Digital City).

Sharing knowledge has become a lot easier. Research, knowledge and innovation about Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Area are now collected and shared on the website openresearch.amsterdam. Here you can find knowledge you need to bring projects a step further and share your own research.

A lot of research is being done in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. Researchers, officials and designers work to understand complex problems. Problems that contain all kinds of themes and disciplines that are important for the smart, green and healthy future of the region. There is already a lot of collaboration, but many organizations are still working on research on the same topics, while they don't know each other. That is why there is OpenResearch - to share research and knowledge and to make connections visible.

Amsterdam Smart City uses OpenResearch to communicate the research we did in the past and bring knowledge about the themes we work on. You can also find all our publications on the platform.

The platform was developed by the Chief Science Office of Amsterdam, together with the knowledge institutions, the Amsterdam Economic Board and other parties from the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area under the City Deal Knowledge Making. The site is still under development.

Bas Boorsma explores what can we learn from the accelerated digital transition triggered by COVID-19.

Wat betekenen Livings Labs voor de Metropool Amsterdam? De komende weken geven we een podium aan diverse Living Labs binnen de regio. In deel 3 spreken we met Nora van der Linden, directeur van Kennisland. “Als we problemen willen oplossen moeten we de mensen waarover het gaat bij die oplossing betrekken.”

Lees verder op Board Insights.

Wat betekenen Livings Labs voor de Metropool Amsterdam? De komende weken geven we een podium aan diverse Living Labs binnen de regio. In deel 2 van deze serie spreken we met Leendert Verhoef, programmaleider Living Labs, van AMS Institute – het Amsterdamse kennisinstituut voor grootstedelijke vraagstukken – over de kracht van Living Labs en de aanpak van het AMS institute.

Lees verder op Insights.

In februari geven we met Board Insights een podium aan diverse Living Labs binnen de regio.

In deel 1 spreken we met Chandar van der Zande, die nauw betrokken was bij De Ceuvel. Één van de meest duurzame en vernieuwende experimenten in Europa.

“De Ceuvel 2.0 was het meest innovatieve stukje van Amsterdam, 3.0 moet dat ook weer worden. Alleen dan groter en beter. En dat is hard nodig want we hebben nog maar tien jaar om de oplossingen voor een nieuwe economie te bedenken, te toetsen en op te schalen om de klimaatcrisis het hoofd te bieden.”

Las Vegas was hit by a cyber attack on 7 January which followed an earlier attack in New Orleans, with the city declaring a state of emergency on 13 December. The threat of cyber attacks is growing as cities digitalise their services and use datasets to provide more efficient delivery to citizens.

Beste community,

Mijn naam is Arvin Vishnudatt. Momenteel ben ik op zoek naar een afstudeerstage.

Ik studeer Bedrijfskunde MER aan de Hogeschool van Amsterdam. Om mijn laatste jaar van de opleiding af te ronden, zal ik vanaf februari 2020 afstuderen. Ik zal twintig weken lang (3 februari tot en met 19 juni 2020) een onderzoek uitvoeren voor de organisatie. Dit in de richting van procesoptimalisatie of organisatiekunde, aangezien hier mijn interesse ligt en mijn ervaring zit.

Huidig ben ik namelijk bezig met een project voor de HvA/UvA om het proces van koffiebekers circulair te maken. Hiermee ben ik erg ingesteld op duurzaamheid en circulariteit. Dit valt binnen de sector Smart City's. Verder heb ik ervaring met het samenwerken met en samenbrengen van stakeholders om aan het gezamenlijke doel te werken.

Tijdens het afstuderen zal ik een rapport opstellen dat bestaat uit opgebouwd onderzoek. Het doel van dit rapport is om een advies te schrijven dat het probleem of kwestie aan kan pakken binnen de organisatie/afdeling.

Vanuit de Hogeschool van Amsterdam heb ik een aantal eisen, waaraan het bedrijf dient te voldoen:
- De organisatie bestaat minimaal 2 jaar en heeft minimaal 20 werknemers in dienst.
- De begeleider vanuit de organisatie heeft minimaal HBO-niveau. En is zelf minimaal twee jaar werkzaam binnen de organisatie.
- Je kunt vier dagen per week aan je onderzoek besteden en bent vrijgesteld van meewerken (meewerken is mogelijk in overleg met de studiebegeleider).
- Je hebt dagelijks contact met je collega's, neemt deel aan overleggen en eventueel aan informele activiteiten op het werk.
- Je hebt een werkplek met computer.

Verder is mijn CV te vinden in de bijlage.

Mocht u een interessante afstudeeropdracht hebben voor mij, dan hoor ik graag van u.

Ik ben te bereiken op: Arvin.Vishnudatt@hva.nl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arvin-vishnudatt-358805140

Met vriendelijke groet,

Arvin Vishnudatt

Hogeschool van Amsterdam

Free Press Unlimited is offering a five to six month internship (32 hours a week) starting in January 2020. We're looking for a tech-savvy student or recent graduate with a relevant educational background and affinity with media development.

You will support several media projects implemented together with international partners. You will join the Gender, Safety & Accountability team in realising projects with global coverage in the field of digital safety and investigative journalism.

Are you drawn to whistleblowing platforms for media, online digital security courses for journalists? Do you feel confident about your knowledge of encryption, privacy, open source software and safe communication options? Then this internship is for you!

Learn how to build a #smartregion or a #smartvillage! Check what David Bárta chose from the best examples and concepts of smart cities in Europe

How city data is transforming the way we live

8 cities show how smart data is changing the way we live. From Las Vegas to Copenhagen, smart technology is used everywhere for an efficient, safe and pleasant living environment. How exactly does smart data management work and what advantages do new technologies have for companies and the residents of the city?

1. Las Vegas: live data

Bold, brash and operating 24-hours a day, Las Vegas is a city like no other, attracting millions of visitors a year to its bustling casinos. But as well as hosting 43 million tourists each year, the city is home to almost 650,000 residents who need services including public safety, transportation and utilities. City officials recently turned to smart city data management to ease the pressure.

They used Hitachi’s Smart Spaces and Video Intelligence solution, which is a combination of hardware and software that leverages intelligent video and other internet of things (IoT) data to provide a single view of activity, operations, and safety issues with intelligence for real-time data and analysis, deploying resources more efficiently.

For example, the city can produce heat maps of streets that can indicate if a pothole is likely to develop in a given location and take steps to fix the issue before it starts to damage vehicles. Elsewhere, rubbish collection routes have been reduced from ten hours to four, redeploying employees to help with other services.

2. Seoul: smart waste solutions

With almost ten million people living in Seoul, South Korea’s capital city, waste management has become an area of focus and, as one of the most high-tech cities in the world, it’s no surprise that big data and IoT has become part of the solution.

“Ecube Labs was founded in Seoul when the first smart city projects started to emerge in Korea,” explains Guillaume Weill, project director at Intralink. “The company’s focus is on four main products, which have now been installed in more than 150 locations in Seoul, from parks to department stores, leisure venues and tourist districts.”

These include solar-powered waste bins which compact rubbish, fill-level sensors monitoring the quantity of waste in each bin, a big data platform gathering the information from the bins and a platform that automatically refines manual collection routes based on machine-learning algorithms, bringing huge cost-savings and a cleaner city.

3. Amsterdam: 3D-printed smart bridge

With its network of canals, Amsterdam has more bridges than almost any other city in the world, around 1,800 in total. But what if smart city data management meant those bridges could talk to other infrastructure to optimise travel around the city? The MX3D bridge is the world’s first 3D-printed steel bridge designed by Joris Laarman Lab in collaboration with Arup and supported by Autodesk and other partners.

Dutch firm MX3D is using industrial six-axis robots, proprietary software and welding machines that deposit stainless steel from thin, molten wire to build the 40-foot-long smart pedestrian bridge spanning the Oudezijds Achterburgwal, one of the oldest canals in Amsterdam.

Equipped with sensors, the bridge streams data to the cloud where it is then processed and interpreted to visualise intelligence about bridge traffic, structural integrity, and the surrounding neighbourhood and environment. The bridge can send alerts when it needs maintenance and can even talk to roadways to time the lights better to reduce congestion at busy times.

"Innovative solutions ensure enormous cost savings plus a cleaner city"

4. San Francisco: smart cycles

One of the strategic goals of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is to prioritise transport that doesn’t involve a car. Part of its vision for a sustainable transportation system includes a safe network of bicycle-friendly streets so people of all ages and ability can feel confident travelling on two wheels.

The SFMTA uses automated counters to monitor key bicycle data, which it analyses annually to get an idea of cycle use in the city. Using the information provided by these smart monitors, the SFMTA added ten miles to the bikeway network and created thirty new intersections. Of those new miles, 5.5 received physical protection from passing traffic.

More than eight million bikes were counted at forty locations in 2018, but the data showed 63 per cent of the weekly ridership was occurring in just seventeen of the fifty-one reporting counters. This information enables the city to focus its improvement efforts where they are needed most.

5. Stratford, Ontario: perfect parking

Parking in cities is often frustrating and time consuming. But with the help of smart city data management, it can become a much simpler affair. Seeing the opportunity, the City of Stratford in Ontario, Canada, has invested in smart technology so visitors can spend less time trawling for a space and more time spending money in local businesses.

The city has installed 78 IoT sensors thatmerge information with global positioning system, or GPS, data and relay whether a parking spot is free or empty, with updates provided every half an hour to an Amazon Web Services MQTT Broker, which relays the update to the Information Builders WebFOCUS data analytics platform. WebFOCUS then creates easily read visualisations, which convey which spaces are free where, when the busiest parking periods are, and which are the preferred car parks, levels and spaces used by residents and visitors.

6. Edam-Volendam: smart lighting

With its authentic streets and charming fishing port, Edam-Volendam is a real tourist attraction. The municipality wanted to reduce the energy bill for public lighting and at the same time ensure a safe environment for visitors and residents. The smart lighting systems from Luminext in combination with LED luminaires from Lightronics and Lightwell provide the solution.

By illuminating only where it is needed and by dimming as soon as there is no traffic on the street, Edam-Volendam saves energy while ensuring a safe environment. With the smart lighting technology in the luminaires and the telemanagement system from Luminext, the public lighting network is controlled and managed remotely.

The smart lighting ensures that the amount of light is automatically adjusted to the need for light on the street. More light in dark alleys enhances the feeling of safety and dimming the street lighting in a residential area causes less light nuisance in the bedroom, which is good for a good night’s sleep. The smart lighting system automatically detects defective lamps, allowing repairs to be started quickly and to make the lighting function well as soon as possible. That also benefits street safety. The lighting installation and energy consumption are continuously monitored to be able to dim the lighting as efficiently as possible. As a result, the energy savings are optimal.

7. Copenhagen: energy saving

With dwindling global energy supplies and the environmental impact of certain types of energy, cities must look carefully at their use. It’s unsurprising then that energy use is a huge consideration when it comes to smart cities using big data.

Frederiksberg Forsyning, a publicly owned utility company in Copenhagen, aimed to create a smart energy supply solution that would optimise their supply network and create efficiency savings. One of the issues with doing this is the reliability of data, with utility companies often reliant on customers for monthly or yearly meter readings.

To tackle this, the company created a connectivity network across the municipality and then installed sensors in their pipelines to measure usage from the point of production to the substation and on to the end-customer. They went from getting infrequent customer readings to 700 data points a second, seeing savings on water loss and energy use.

8. Brussels: Smart transport tech

The Belgian capital city of Brussels relies on four metro train lines, seventeen tram lines and fifty bus lines to get its residents where they need to go. STIB–MIVB, the company that runs these services tracks 401 million journeys a year and 1,200 vehicles. To handle the stream of big data, it partnered with SAP and Cubis to access the analytics needed to improve customer service and run the system more efficiently.

As well as improving the experience of commuters and visitors, the partnership has enabled more proactive vehicle maintenance, greater transparency when it comes to use of public funds, the ability to cater for passengers with disabilities and reduced environmental impact.

“Cities are full of data that can help us better understand travel times, routes and crunch points on a network,” says Brian Duffy, SAP’s Europe, Middle East and Africa north regional president. “If used in the right way, data insights can help people get to where they are going faster, more efficiently and more reliably.”

Sources: Luminext & ‘Future Cities’; Special editen by publisher Raconteur, international distributed with The Times in june 2019.

More information at Luminext.eu or info@luminext.eu

Er zijn maar weinig organisaties die de complexiteit van een overheidsorganisatie benaderen. Succesvol innoveren binnen een overheidsorganisatie is dan ook een utopie volgens sommigen. Het boek 'Bouwen aan morgen' van Dany Robberecht en Stijn Smet doet een dappere poging om te komen tot een raamwerk voor innoveren binnen overheidsorganisaties. Het boek dat is gebaseerd op het RICE-model van Verhaert, gaat over diensteninnovaties, nieuwe bedrijfsmodellen, productinnovaties en de daar bijhorende procesinnovaties. 'Bouwen aan morgen' is tot stand gekomen in een samenwerking tussen het A&O fonds Gemeenten, gemeente Utrecht en Verhaert – Masters in Innovation en is gratis te downloaden via www.bouwenaanmorgen.org

Interesting vacancy in the field of Circularity and Smart City development.

Vacature: Onderzoeker Circulair Verpakken (0,4 FTE)

Als onderzoeker geef je een impuls aan het praktijkgericht onderzoek rondom circulair verpakken bij de HvA.

Wij bieden een interessante baan in een bruisende onderzoekomgeving. De HvA doet baanbrekend en innovatief onderzoek in samenwerking met vooraanstaande partners binnen dit werkveld en werkt aan de ontwikkeling van innovatieve, duurzaamheid bevorderende modellen, tools en kennis. Heb je een master in industrieel ontwerpen, of een andere discipline die aansluit bij het thema "Circulair Verpakken" en beschik je over meer dan 4 jaar ervaring als verpakkingsontwerper of verpakkingsdeskundige in het bedrijfsleven of als verpakkingsonderzoeker bij een kennisinstelling? Dan zijn wij op zoek naar jou!

Last year, a group of students from Sciences Po Paris conducted a research on Smart City Assets. The project was commissioned by the EIB Institute, a non-profit organisation from the EIB Group, operating as the European Union’s investment arm. The purpose of this survey was to help the EIB Group provide Smart City promoters with more targeted support from its lending and advising activities around the world. Here under are the results of the research.

With the goal to establish this recurring research as a reference for urban stakeholders, the project is pursued for the second time this year. For those who have participated in a Smart City project, we would greatly appreciate if you could answer this year’s survey (estimate: 12 minutes). You can find it at the following link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YZ8KJXG

In a smart city, open co-creation of smart city solutions is key. Finding new ways of creating value and making a collaborative business model can be quite challenging. That's why we, Amsterdam Smart City and the Amsterdam University of Applied Science, did a research on value creating and developed a model for open collaborative business modelling. The publication helps you making a collaborative business model with more in depth insights in the process and theory behind it, but also supplies you with easy to apply tools and formats.

Find it here!

Publication and article in Dutch

The BRIDE project is looking for participants for a study on understanding human interaction with “smart” infrastructure visa-a-vi machine learning.

The experiment will take place in Amsterdam February 2019. Participants will get to interact with the world’s first 3D printed footbridge.

If interested, please email Sage Cammers-Goodwin (s.i.cammers-goodwin@utwente.nl)

Tom van Arman is architect and urbanist using open data and applications to create more social, sustainable and resilient cities. He is founder of Tapp and co-founder of CITIXL, member of the board of Appsterdam and curator for Amsterdam Smart City. In the following we talk about the Smart City programmes he uses as a citizen, on the latest projects he is working on as specialist, and on the must-see smart city tours and projects that travellers can check around central Amsterdam.

Interested in more? Read the Smart City Portrait of Amsterdam:
https://www.igloo.ro/smart-city-portrait-amsterdam/