Citython 2022 Series Launched

By KAJO

Image: I-CHANGE MeteoTracker from the Genoa Living Lab

During the last weekend of April, I-CHANGE partner KAJO organized an event focusing on smart urban mobility and climate resilience. The Citython Žilina 2022 was organized under EIT Urban Mobility and it brought together an international team of people with different backgrounds, implementing their ideas from inception to presentable projects or prototypes in only 54 hours.

During the weekend, the teams were accompanied by experienced mentors and speakers: representatives of the Žilina city, Žilina autonomous region, Ministry of Transport, Ministry of Environment, KIA Foundation (BikeKIA), and the Slovak Missing Maps group were among others. Two other I-CHANGE partner organizations participated with inspirational talks. Florian Pappenberger from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ECMWF presented activities of ECMWF and Copernicus tailored to urban areas and Francesco Pila from University College Dublin presented activities of the Dublin Living Lab.

The Citython was an outstanding opportunity to present the I-CHANGE Living Labs concepts and technologies (MeteoTracker), challenge their transferability in a new city, and initiate the project exploitation activities.

KAJO will continue this Citython series in Košice (Slovakia) in June/July 2022 and Neapoli-Sykies (Greece) in September 2022 which will also give other I-CHANGE partners the opportunity to present project achievements.

More information is available at www.citython.sk

The challenges of the Citython Žilina were:

Challenge 1 – Help your city management to promote smart mobility and foster change towards more sustainable and climate resilient cities.

Participants should develop solutions to assist the municipality in promoting and engaging citizens in activity-travel modes (e.g. walking and cycling) and help to reduce overall travels (e.g. use of public transport, carpooling, etc.) Solutions should promote sustainable activity-travel behavior, engaging smart city navigation services based on both traditional (ESA, Galileo) and volunteer & citizen generated content. Utilize the sensors available in the city to monitor, manage and predict the traffic in the city to improve the overall traffic situation and increase use of public transport. Help the Žilina city to build a data ecosystem for climate-neutral and smart communities, which will facilitate the access, share, and re-use of locally relevant data (in sectors such as mobility, energy, climate and zero pollution).

Challenge 2 – Engagement of the public in city planning and development towards smart mobility, and safer, greener and more liveable city.

This challenge targets the development of solutions for engaging the public in challenges related to city mobility (e.g. safety, noise, air-quality) by providing them user-friendly tools to analyze and interact with sensor data available in the city. Utilize the observational data available at the city and tailor them to ignite and drive continuous collaborative and participatory city development. Solutions should stimulate and assist the public participation in active mobility (bike sharing, design of cycling paths, public transport optimization), combined with urban greening, green areas revitalisation and implementation of nature-based solutions to improve the overall quality of life. Solution could also build on local community mapping initiatives to improve quality of spatial information.

Challenge 3 – Building smart mobility in the context of extreme weather and humanitarian emergencies.

Address mobility challenges in context of extreme events such as extreme weather, pandemics (decreasing numbers of travelers) or humanitarian crises (increasing numbers of travelers). Make smart mobility resilient for civil protection and the management of extreme events. Combine smart mobility with measuring atmospheric variables or enhance the overall resilience of the city with co-designing nature-based solutions (e.g., trees and other green infrastructure) to reduce air quality issues and impacts of extreme weather events. Solutions should also seek to consider the possible impact of climate change on the urban mobility in the city and the disturbances it may cause based on Copernicus Climate Change Service data.