Local Visit: Municipality of Thessaloniki
VISIT CATEGORY: Smart Cities
VISIT TIME: 16:15-17:30
MODE OF TRANSPORT: Bus from Concert Hall to the Municipality*. No return to the venue after the visit – the participants will return on their own to their destinations.
(*a bus will be waiting participants in front of the OLLD venue)
What will you see during the visit
Smart City Design in Thessaloniki: An evolutionary agenda. Joint activity focused on the efforts of the city to design and implement a smart city strategy in Thessaloniki that enhances the city economic, environmental and social sustainability.
The aim of the workshop is to discuss the design logic of both the strategy and the applications and to go deeper into the logic that shape smart city development. Mainly, to highlight the evolutionary characteristics of smart city planning, as a process which does not have the usual features of planning.
The smart city initiatives in Thessaloniki reveal the complex dimension of smart city planning as a synthesis of technologies, user engagement, and windows of opportunity, which are fuzzy at the start of the planning process. It is process that shares similar characteristics to Living Labs. The evolutionary features of cities, which until now were ascribed to the working of markets, are now shaping the
institutional aspects of planning for smart cities.
About the Municipality
Since 2009, the city of Thessaloniki has made significant efforts to implement a series of activities that contribute to its journey towards becoming a smart city. The municipality of Thessaloniki took advantage of many smart city opportunities and support programs globally, such as the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge, the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities, collaboration with the World Bank, joint research with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Horizon 2020 Programmes, participation in the Digital Cities Challenge of the European Commission, and gradually elaborated a smart city strategy for open economy, sustainable and sustainable infrastructure and participatory governance. Moreover, the Municipality of Thessaloniki has developed many smart city applications enabling collaborative governance (improve-my-city), consultation with citizens on the budget (open-budget), monitoring air pollution, open wifi hotspots, GIS open data, and online administrative services to citizens. Also hosted two hackathons for the design and development of new applications (Apps for Thessaloniki: Tourism edition & HackaThess). Many of the above initiatives were implemented in cooperation of the Municipality of Thessaloniki with URENIO Research of Aristotle University and the Open Knowledge Foundation, Greece.