The smart city of tomorrow starts today
Researching new systems together. The Smart City Living Lab investigates what the city of the future will look like and how people will live there under real-life conditions. Citizens from the district are also involved in the projects.
The conservation of vital resources such as water, food and energy is the focus of the research project's Living Lab
The ParKli research project is investigating the consequences of climate change on local nature and habitats
Cities around the world are undergoing rapid change and are faced with major challenges, such as providing food, energy and water for their inhabitants, integrating such resources into material cycles or ensuring socially balanced and economically productive communities. In the Smart City Living Lab (Living Lab = real laboratory) of the Herman Hollerith Center (HHZ) at Reutlingen University, research is being conducted into precisely these challenges together with local stakeholders from politics, business and civil society. The Living Lab is a user-friendly, real-world research environment. The big difference to similar user-centered research methods: The Living Lab empowers its users:inside to act in an open development environment.
This approach shifts the development of innovative products from the lab to the real world. Potential users can express their opinions on new products and services as early as possible or test initial prototypes in everyday life. The Living Lab process generally focuses on the activities of co-creation, exploration, experimentation and evaluation, which are carried out in the Living Lab by an interdisciplinary team. The partners of the Smart City Living Lab are the district of Böblingen and the towns and municipalities in the district.
Smart parking, organic food and climate change
Research topics are addressed both as part of publicly funded projects and as part of independent research by the professors involved. In the field of sustainable mobility, for example, intelligent, citizen-relevant services for the multimodal use of mobility means are being developed and implemented as examples. This includes smart parking or the optimization of traffic flow and public transport such as buses and trains. The ÖkoTrans project is investigating transformation processes to increase the proportion of organically produced food in out-of-home catering. The aim is to make better use of the potential of out-of-home catering in Baden-Württemberg as a sales market for regional organic food.
The 5G-PreCiSe pilot project is aimed at the real-time networking of smart farming (SF) systems and processes using 5G in order to provide agriculture with a previously unavailable information basis for success-critical and sustainable decisions in the cultivation of arable land.
Out of the lab and into nature: the participating citizens become active themselves in the research project
In ParKli, citizens are actively involved in collecting data and developing measures
In the ParKli research project, the consequences of climate change on local nature and habitats are being investigated through citizen science activities. To this end, existing systems are being integrated to actively involve citizens in the process of data collection and the development of measures. The central research question is: How can existing applications and data sources from environmental informatics be integrated in order to develop local measures for climate impact adaptation together with the population? The aim of ParKli is to work with key stakeholders to develop a toolkit with best practice recommendations such as technologies, measures and processes for early warning systems for climate adaptation.
