OrganiCity
OrganiCity is a EU project with € 7.2m in funding that puts people at the center of the development of future cities. The project brings together 3 leading smart cities and a total of 15 consortium members with great diversity in skills and experience.
“According to United Nations projections, seven out of ten people worldwide will be living in cities by 2050. This is a development which, together with a comprehensive move towards digital technologies, sets cities under tremendous pressure”, says Associate Professor of Information Studies at Aarhus University, Martin Brynskov. He is coordinator of the project, and drives home the message that the core objective is to put people at the center of the development of future cities.
OrganiCity consists of a close collaboration between Aarhus, London and Santander – three cities which all have extensive experience using so-called “smart city” technologies. These technologies include ways to improve cities’ services for citizens while at the same time reducing resource consumption.
As civic participation and co-creation are considered by the project as an equally important component of future cities as technology solutions, €1.8m, one quarter of the entire budget, is reserved directly for citizen-driven experiments. And so the stage is being set for cooperation and participation, for collaborative city experiments developed with, and at the initiative of, citizen groups, organizations, authorities and companies.
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