FOR 5393: The future smart town

Basic data for this project

Description

The research group 'Future Digital Towns' investigates how mid-sized cities, i.e. towns, meet the challenges of digitalisation and develops digital instruments to strengthen their liveability. The project focuses on the four central structural areas of a town: civil society & social services, administration & government, economy & energy, and, finally, education & culture. The digital transformation as an ever-increasing networking of information and processes offers enormous potential for all areas of life and work. Many of today's most pressing problems can be addressed through digitalisation, e.g. through the more sustainable use of existing resources. At the same time, however, digitalisation also poses major challenges for actors, especially if, for example, financial or material resources to implement digitalisation projects in a sustainable way are lacking. In this context, current research often discusses the transformation of cities, mostly metropolitan areas, through digitalisation, referred to as 'Smart Cities'. Proposed concepts are often based on the given, very narrow local structures, large administrations, and the associated large pool of resources. However, towns outside of metropolitan regions, which have similar structural problems as large cities, but at the same time have specific characteristics that prevent a one-to-one transfer of smart city concepts, are out of sight. As a rule, mid-sized cities have 20,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, and it is precisely in rural areas, where there is an increasing number of cities of this type, that they have an important social, political and economic significance as a centre for even smaller towns and communities in the surrounding area. Towns therefore have a special identity which often leads to a particularly strong identification with the town and region for their inhabitants. However, these towns are most severely affected by demographic and economic changes. Questions of mobility, demographic change in terms of the development of living and housing, economic development and attractive conditions for highly qualified specialists or the comprehensive range of educational and cultural offers pose particular challenges to towns. These challenges become even greater when these towns are characterised by different districts, each of which - to a certain extent - must be developed and supported individually. The research group analyses specific challenges of towns and develops instruments with which these can be met, so that digital towns can be developed that preserve the identity of and identification with the town and region. Towns, because of their size and medium complexity, are best suitable for our investigations and developments as experimental fields and 'real labs'. Manifold content and methodology interdependencies across the six subprojects and the use of the 'capability approach' by Armatya Sen strengthen the coherence of the research group.