#connectedinEurope: Basel-Freiburg-Mulhouse work on cross-border data sharing

The discourse in recent years around smart cities and digital policy is mentioning it more and more and the EU Data Act has provided already regulatory framework: Data sharing is one of the big trend topics for digitally driven cities, the targeted exchange of data between different stakeholders, sectors and areas one of the promising future practices of thriving urban data economies and policy spaces.

With this in mind, Basel, Freiburg and Mulhouse have formulated the ambition to work on a joint cross-border data exchange that complements and expands the cities' respective data bases and should therefore enable completely new applications and use cases. In doing so, the cities will benefit from the partnership that has grown out of many years of trusting cooperation.

For this cooperation on smart city topics, the cities formed a tridem in the #connectedinEurope programme and met in several workshops on site.

The beginning of the workshop series facilitated a structured introduction to the cities' respective smart city approaches, activities and problems. Basel, for example, presented the Smart City Lab Basel, an interim use of a disused railway site in the city to promote local, innovative start-ups that are working on solutions for the circular economy or new mobility architectures for bicycles, for example.

Freiburg explained its strategies and IT architecture for setting up Daten:Raum:Freiburg, which could be expanded to include an international pillar through the joint project, and used the new interior design of the working environment in the new city hall to illustrate how social innovation and agile working methods can be promoted in teams. Mulhouse emphasised the conversion and climate-resilient redesign of individual urban spaces, a survey on the level of digital participation among the population and the planning of a first digital twin in an urban district.

The cities then outlined several fields of action and sketched initial ideas for use cases for their cross-border data exchange. At the same time, a sandbox was developed to test the status quo of the functionality of the digital interfaces for data sets of each city.

The cities are now working on structuring a multi-year project, the ‘Triregio Dataspace’, defining working groups and resource requirements and drawing up a roadmap.