Smart City radar and participation: Opening of the Dresden City Forum attracted thousands of visitors

An overwhelming rush to the "Open City Hall" day for Dresden's city administration: Around 12,000 visitors wanted to see the inside of the Stadtforum Dresden, a new administrative center in the heart of the city. The opening on March 29 offered citizens' consultations, information and hands-on offers on the services of the offices as well as several contributions from WISSENSARCHITEKTUR - Laboratory of Knowledge Architecture (TU Dresden).

For example, one team displayed a virtual 3D model of the building in its presentation area. This allowed citizens to go on a tour using a touch table or even immersively with VR glasses - an offer that was very popular with young and old alike. They also provided visual support for the presentation of the Federal Garden Show 2033 project.

Smart City Radar

As the scientific management institution for the accompanying research in the Smart City Dresden model project (MPSC), the members of WISSENSARCHITEKTUR also presented a model of their "Smart City Radar", which is currently being developed, at their stand. The tool is intended to bundle projects, topics and stakeholders that use digital innovations to make Dresden a "smart city", i.e. more sustainable, social and liveable. After an internal test phase, the radar will be made publicly available and populated in a participatory manner; it will offer brief information, links and contact persons; views and filters will group the data and show connections. The aim is to obtain a broad picture of smart city activities in Dresden in order to identify synergies and make networking possible.

Smart Participation

As part of the MPSC measure "Toolbox Smart Participation", citizens were also able to try out instruments for citizen participation. The co-design tool U_CODE, which can be used to create designs and make comments in the model, represented the city forum: visitors were allowed to mark their favorite places and leave their opinion on the building. A short survey on the touch table next door wanted to know what types of participation are known, which methods of co-determination are considered the means of choice and the smart city question: digital, analog or both? This was not just a demonstration or a gimmick. The results are stored and can serve the team as trend indicators for future surveys.

Overall, these offers, the billboards and the new website smartcity.dresden.de met with a great response from visitors, and in addition to the digital participations, there were exciting discussions.

You can find more information about the new city forum and the opening on the website of the state capital Dresden.