First OrganiCity Clinic held in Brussels
Our second open call has generated some great support from new city hosts across Europe, including Glasgow (Scotland), Brussels (Belgium), Velenje (Slovenia) and Borgomanero and Moncalieri (Italy). Over the coming weeks, we will publish a series of guest blogs written by each city, where they’ll introduce us to their experience and achievements with OrganiCity so far.
This week, we’re hearing from Brussels in Belgium:
LET’S CO-CREATE OUR CITY
During the month of August, Brussels Creative, Civic Innovation Network and DigitYser hosted two OrganiCity Clinics (workshops) in DigitYser’s building in Brussels. They invited people who had strong citizen-led ideas, which could change the way we live and experience our cities. More than 125 people attended, including entrepreneurs, hackers, data scientists, civil servants and interested citizens!
The Clinic was organised by 3 partners actively involved in citizen-driven innovation; Brussels Creative (the bridge builder between industries promoting cross-over innovation), Civic Innovation Network (with its citizen-driven initiatives) and DigitYser (with their new building dedicated to data and technologies). This partnership is built on the foundation of collaboration rather than competition and is sharing competencies and communities to demonstrate the new spirit of Brussels.
“We are convinced that many European calls and opportunities are not taken by Brussels due to a lack of organisation within our ecosystems not detecting or grabbing the challenges provided by the Institutions and their program.” Dixit Brussels Creative
OrganiCity challenges citizens, researchers, companies and public authorities to co-create solutions for urban innovation using technologies and data.
The Brussels Workshops
On 10th August 2017, 125 people accepted the invitation for the two OrganiCity Clinics.
The first workshop offered ice-breaking exercises to show the importance of collaboration and communication within teams (Lego game), a group meditation practice to imagine Brussels in 2030, and finally, an activity to categorise our projects under city challenge themes to start forming experiment proposals.
The Themes:
- Urban mobility
- Food logistics
- Waste management
- Care and assistance
- Education and inclusion
- Crowd intelligence and civic hardware
- Future of Work – Digital crafters
- Civic media and information
- Environment, water, soil and air
- Political transparency
Civic Innovation Network and Brussels Creative produced a short film in collaboration with Brussels Authorities to communicate the value of the Clinic and project ideas.
At the end of the first Clinic, we’d identified and selected 15 projects. Project leaders were invited to join the second Clinic on the 22nd of August, where they were provided with assistance to finalise and submit their project proposals, as well as receive support from the Brussels authorities. Combining grassroots initiatives with support from public authorities is driving a new movement within our European cities.
The final projects are very diverse and based on open data provided by the Brussels Smart City strategy and tools.
The Brussels submissions to OrganiCity for 2017 included:
- Food waste
- Sanitary for women
- Air pollution
- Parking issues
- Sound pollution
Brussels wants to demonstrate its creativity, its grassroots initiatives, its capacity towards cross-discipline innovation, its collaborative ecosystem and its ambition to become one of the leading SMART cities in Europe.
OrganiCity encourages people all over the world to create their own events to spread our way of working. Brussels Creative, DigitYser and the Civic Innovation Network took our guidelines and put a lot of effort in hosting their own event.
Learn more about Brussels Creative (BC) here
Learn more about Civic Innovation Network (CIN) here
Learn more about DigitYser (DY) here
Have a look at our Facebook page.