Centre for Sustainability and Metabolism of Cities win the challenge
Last week Centre for Sustainability and the platform Metabolism of Cities joined forces in the challenge Central Innovation District (CID) Knowledge LAB 2018. We pitched our proposal "Metabolism of Cities Hackathon" on 25 May along with 10 other teams and were one of the 5 winning teams! With this project, we make it possible to study the Urban Metabolism of The Hague by collecting and visualising data sets. It gives The Hague the possibility to get a better understanding of its sustainability performance, and The Hague will be part of an international cities project!
Urban Metabolism explained
Do you want to know how The Hague performs in water management? Then you need to know what goes in to the city, what is consumed where and what goes out. The same counts for energy: what kind of energy comes in, where is it consumed, and what goes out? Or, if you want to know how to improve the accessibility and sustainability of the city, you have to know what the current flows of transportation are. This is what is studied within Urban Metbolism: it gives an systematic overview of all material and energy flows in a city and helps cities to improve their sustainability performance.
About CID Knowledge Lab
The Municipality of The Hague, Leiden University, Delft University of Technology and The Hague University of Applied Sciences have joined forces in a new partnership. They aim to work towards the establishment of a Knowledge Lab, in which researchers, lecturers, officials, international guests, doctoral candidates and graduating students will be jointly studying the city of the future. To examine the new questions of the city of the future and to develop new innovation practices, they have recently launched a call for proposal to submit ideas on how to achieve innovations for the CID.
The scientific platform "Metabolism of Cities Hackathon" reached out to us to partner up in this challenge. This has led to the proposal: "Metabolism of Cities Hackathon - Crowdsourcing urban metabolism data for The Hague".
Part of the MultiCity Project
With this proposal we aim to gather as much data around circular economy and sustainability as possible. The hackathon will be part of the MultiCity Project (led by the platform Metbolism of Cities) in which cities like Brussels, Cape Town and Mexico City participate.
What is the MultiCity Project? The Platform Metabolism of Cities is founded by a group of international scientists who in their study to Urban Metabolism were so much focused on the collection of data, that they wanted a system in which they could easily share data from publications and research. The platform was born. Recently a few scientists wanted to take it a step further and started the MultiCity Project: in this project they facilitate groups of volunteers with the identification of relevant datasets. The platform takes care of indexing, processing, and standardising the datasets. For example, in Cape Town, water management is a big issue. A network of volunteers collected and uploaded all kind of relevant datasets and the platform took care of the processing and visualisation. The city get's its own dashboard which looks like this:
Hackathon in The Hague
With a team of 10 students from the resilient cities hub, led by Benjamin Sprecher (Assistant Professor), Fenna Plaisier (Community Manager) and the team from the Metabolism of Cities project we will gather as much datasets that are related to urban resource stocks and flows, or other data related to urban metabolism. This information will be loaded into the MultipliCity project, which will be tailored to suit the type of information that is of interest to the CID and that is relevant to The Hague. The coming weeks we will research together with officials from The Hague which datasets are most relevant for The Hague.
Are you interested in joining the hackathon?
If you want to join the hackathon, write an email to Fenna Plaisier - f.c.plaisier@cml.leidenuniv.nl
There is no fixed date for the hackathon yet.