ROADMAP METHODOLOGY FOR CO-CREATING SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS AND MANAGING IMPACT

More sustainability and liveability are policy goals of utmost importance for city administrations. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an important guideline in this, in particular but not exclusively, SDG 11, which aims to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable, and SDG17, building on local and international innovation ecosystems. To meet the targets, we need to reframe and re-think the governance and management of the city, to identify what works and what does not work, and to develop a vision for its buildings, infrastructures and public spaces attuned to its citizens’ and local businesses’ interests.

• Which innovative methods can help developing better, open and inclusive governance processes and structures for co-design and co-creation of people-centric, demand-driven smart city solutions?
• How can the economic and non-economic value of smart city solutions for distinctive stakeholder groups and ex-ante and ex-poste assessment of their impact be appreciated and managed?
• How can all these elements be integrated in a consistent roadmap methodology for co-creation and decision support?

In this roundtable, we want to discuss how to adjust the promising roadmap methodologies of the Smart City Guidance Package (SCGP) to specific Norwegian context in terms of legal and regulatory contexts, spatial planning procedures, ICT, transport and energy infrastructures, and the Norwegian culture of citizen participation. This will result in a validated, specific Norwegian edition of the SCGP which supports the transformative actions foreseen by city partners in close collaboration with their local stakeholders (citizens, NGOs, researchers, businesses and other public sector partners). The roadmap methodology will include:

• A portfolio of qualified methods and tools that support co-creation of local solutions by private and public sector, research, citizens and other stakeholders, throughout the entire transformation process from visioning to anchoring, planning, piloting, improving, implementing, managing, scaling up and replicating;
• A set of Key Performance Indicators including assessment of what works, what does not, and why, to increase and substantiate the societal impact of urban investments and place them in a proper long-term perspective reflecting the lifecycle of investments in the built environment

Existing solutions:  Together with the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities and nearly 100 city administrations, businesses and research partners across Europe, NTNU has developed a roadmap for creating a resilient long-term, viable and people-centered smart city strategy, based on quadruple helix collaboration, the so-called Smart City Guidance Package (SCGP). The Replication Paper of the European Smart City Information System has gathered experiences on why it is so difficult to replicate successful smart city projects to other cities, making it challenging to create solid business models, and making investments much more expensive than they need to be.

The Smart City Guidance Package and Replication Paper are complementary to the Norwegian smart city roadmap developed by DoGA, the Smartbyene municipal network on smart cities and Nordic Edge. We want to extend the Smart City Guidance Package to include more Nordic, to ensure that it can be used to support the roll-out of DoGA’s Norwegian smart city roadmap.

Download the SCGP from: https://eu-smartcities.eu/documents

What is the city looking for?

We are looking for cities and local stakeholders who want to cooperate on:

• Developing a preliminary customized Norwegian edition of the SCGP by conducting desk research and interviews of cities and other experts on the specific Norwegian context;
• Setting up urban innovation teams in selected cities by collecting information on local conditions, relevant policies and decisions;
• Developing an integrated, long-term strategy per city in a series of workshops with city administration, citizens, NGOs, local businesses, research organisations and other stakeholders;
• Evaluating the added value of this roadmap methodology with participants;
• Including the outcomes in a final customized Norwegian edition of the Smart City Guidance Package;
• Developing standards for people-centric testbeds for small-scale prototyping and proof of concept of innovations in a controlled environment, that can be replicated in other markets and by others;
• Integration in national and international ecosystems to create, facilitate, monitor and substantiate impact in scalable learning environments.

Questions

• Do you think this methodology is useful to get cities started in the field of smart cities, or better connect the dots between different strategies and plans, such as Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans, Sustainable Energy Action Plans, digitalization strategies, Smart City plans and overall city strategies?
• How could something like this support the necessary level of co-creation and co-design with citizens and other stakeholders, such as local businesses?
• What wider uses do you foresee, and other target groups? If so, for whom?
• How can it be used in the Norwegian context?
• Is there any particular information you are missing in this methodology, e.g. regarding the sequence of specific steps?
• Would a web-based version support this process better, if so, how?
• Could this be a European pre-standard?