OFF-CAMPUS TEACHING DAY IN AARHUS
20th March 2017 the entire group of Master’s students from the cand.polyt. degree went to Aarhus DOKK1 for a lecture on smart cities. The location was at the heart of the activities around Smart Aarhus (http://www.smartaarhus.dk/), specifically the Aarhus City Lab (http://www.smartaarhus.dk/node/214).
The purpose of the Aarhus City Lab is to be a test facility for Smart City solutions and a showroom for new smart city initiatives. The City Lab will function as a playground for partners, a test facility for current and future EU initiatives and a place where Aarhus can develop its digital citizenship.
The primary focus areas are mobility, parking, waste, digital art & culture, events, exhibitions, public hearing, interactive installations, incentives for exercise and much more.
The lectures came from different Smart Aarhus key persons, including Bo Fristed, the City CIO, Birgitte Kjærgaard, the head of open data Denmark and Sebastian Christophersen, Project Manager at ITK LAB. Each gave their perspective on smart city and how we can create a more liveable environment for citizens.
Bo Fristed, Aarhus City CIO:
”It is always a pleasure to see the drive, imagination and resourcefulness coming from the students we involve in our Smart City activities. The future looks bright for these students and I look forward to seeing them keep Denmark as an international frontrunner when it comes to the use and development of new technology”.
The lecture was rounded up by throwing 10 city challenges at the students – who solved them in a creative and fun way, applying their latest experiences from the TBMI course.
“To deliver on the promise of a Smart City you need to involve many different stakeholders and bridge bottom-up and top-down perspectives. It is not just big global companies or research institutions who are involved in creating Smart City solutions; NGO’s, startups, citizens and not least students all have an important part to play. Involving students in our Smart City activities in Aarhus is of great importance to us, so when the opportunity to work together with the students from Aarhus University BTECH TBBD presented itself, we were very keen on making this happen. The students did a great job of understanding what a Smart City can be and came up with concepts that reminded us to think differently. Hopefully we will see many of the concepts live on as experiments in the next open call in OrganiCity that we are involved in”. Sebastian Christophersen, Project Manager at ITK LAB / City of Aarhus.