ISCN Online Advisory Programme #14: Smart Cities and Universities - Cooperations, projects and joint challenges

Town hall and university, public administration and higher education plus research: Two core institutions for thriving and future prone cities, yet still often working next to each other rather than with each other. 

In this Online Advisory Programme (OAP), the International Smart Cities Network (ISCN) was keen on exploring with the attendees how to enhance and further vitalize the touchpoints between both sides. Pamela Robinson, professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University shared her experience from the CivicLabTO in Toronto, where 4 colleges and 4 universities from the city come together frequently in city hall chambers to learn first-hand about their cities’ challenges. Sebastian Böhm and Christoph Schubert from the city of Leipzig followed with giving an overview of some of the contact points their Smart City Unit entertains with universities and institutes and diving into one particular example of an AI-solution for floor recognition to automatically estimate housing stocks. 

After a brief discussion on the shared input, our round dived into small breakout rooms to brainstorm and formulate smart city challenges stemming from their experiences and observations as a good starting point for the ISCN to disburse and share with students the world over who are keen to give them a good and curious wrestle.
 

Before starting with her keynote proper, Pamela Robinson did a land acknowledgement, which is part of building new relationships with indigenous communities in Toronto area. With this she also contextualized the name change of her university in 2022 to Toronto Metropolitan after having been named previously after the principal architect of the residential school system in Canada that had removed indigenous children from their communities.

In diving into the activities of the CivicLabTO in Toronto, she then proceeded to describe how linking up and doing direct encounters between 8 higher education institutions and the city hall of Toronto is done through a special course programme. She illustrated how such courses were changing mindsets of both students and public servants, improving trust in local government and also facilitated hiring for city administrations that are often notoriously stressed with finding new talent. 

Dedicated symposia give the collaborations a topical focus, such as “Building back better” after the pandemic or “Collaboration in action” across several working groups such as Public Health, City Building & Mobility, Housing & Neighbourhoods or Climate & Resilience. As a complementing element Toronto has set up a new platform to enable city-university partnerships bi-directionally. (As one attendee noted, openresearch.amsterdam is following a similar approach.)
With this approach being only a few years old, detailed impact assessment is still due but from here experience Pamela concluded that, in the grander scheme of things, CivicLabTO can be understood as a new tool in the people-centered smart city toolkit, “a new governance working model for durable, impactful change.”

Next came Sebastian Böhm and Christoph Schubert, the team from Leipzig, who first gave a short introduction on the Smart City Unit of Leipzig with its cross-functional teams and responsibilities on projects as varied as the city’s data and AI strategy, the Digital Agenda, the Leipzig app and many other smart city challenges. This entails also the Connected Urban Twins (CUT) project that is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development and Building, and whose core aim is to technologically and conceptually further develop urban data platforms and digital twins for broad usage among German municipalities. 
In giving an overview on the different contact points with universities they provided inspiration on further exploring the spectrum of possible collaboration manners. With the Institute for applied computer science (InfAI) they are jointly organizing the Data Week Leipzig. With the University of Technology in Dresden, workshops were held to support the development of the city’s data strategy. Other collaborations yielded ideas on better digital inclusion, or for the SPARCS project for energy positive and zero carbon city districts. 

Unpacking the example of co-developing an AI-model for floor recognition with the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (Scads.AI), they then reflected on the challenges of bringing together the different working modes and dynamics from the administrative and the academic sphere. Thanks to the expertise of institutes and universities a prototype is often quickly set up in a narrow, problem-focused way, but the durable implementation and adaptation to the administrative context is often not straightforward. Christoph and Sebastian untangled how often a more rigid benchmarking is applied to prototypes than to the status quo. The expectation that AI models shall not make any mistakes, for example, is not practicable for the environment of human-only operation where mistakes are a natural part of the process. Their conclusion was that - beyond the “project-fix” that collaborations with unis shall bring about – the organizational evolvement of the institutions involved is an equally crucial aspect to embrace, thus echoing the observations coming from Toronto.