Istanbul dissemination workshop and the consortium meeting of the SmarterLabs Project, co-funded by the European Union’s Urban Europe Joint Programme, was organized at Studio-X from May 30th to June 1st 2018 with the support of Leyla Arsan, CEO of TAGES, as being one of the project’s external advisors. During the workshop, Living Lab practitioners, experts of innovative mobility projects and representatives of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) met the researchers of the SmarterLabs Project and discussed about the Living Lab approaches. SmarterLabs develops a novel approach that anticipates such problems in upscaling, and tests the approach through smart mobility Living Lab experiments in four cities: Bellinzona, Brussels, Graz and Maastricht.
SmarterLabs Project aims to bring together citizens, policymakers, businesses, and researchers to test smart, ICT-based solutions to urban problems in real-life contexts with the ‘Smart City Living Lab’ approach. The project is coordinated by Maastricht University and there are 12 partners from 4 EU countries: Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium. In the scope of the project, the novel Living Lab approach is tested under real-life conditions in the implementation projects in Bellinzona, Brussels, Graz and Maastricht. The implementation guidelines that result from the Living Lab experiments are to be tested and refined through three workshops in Helsinki, Istanbul and Santander.
The Istanbul Workshop was the second dissemination workshop of the project and it was organized and hosted by Leyla Arsan, one of the advisors of the Project. The workshop started with the welcoming speech of Selva Gurdogan, Director of Studio X, which is an urban laboratory that aims to identify the current and future issues facing the city and seeks to generate innovative forms of thinking for their solutions. Mark Dijk, the Coordinator of the SmarterLabs Project, introduced the Project including the themes of upscaling and social inclusion. Kubra Bayraktar, Manager of tthe EU Relations Department of IMM, talked about the experiences in Istanbul regarding anticipation of upscaling of innovations & social inclusion and the typical constraints of the city. She also introduced the Istanbul Living Lab (Zemin Istanbul). Elif Genç from Basaksehir Living Lab presented their Living Lab activities and experiences in Basaksehir district of Istanbul. Besides the Istanbul Living Lab experiments, some innovative mobility technology solutions were also introduced to the SmarterLabs team. Engin Yılmaz, Director of Barrier-free Accessibility Association presented the MOBIETT (provides realtime bus data such as bus stations, bus routes, arrival/departure time, etc) application and its usability aspects and Can Kavanoz and Batuhan Demir from Young Guru Academy presented WeWalk Project (The World’s first smart walking stick).
On the other hand, the SmarterLabs researchers shared the typical constraints for Living Labs in terms of upscaling and social inclusion which could be observed in past mobility projects in the four partner cities of Bellinzona, Brussels, Graz and Maastricht as well as in the ongoing Living Lab experiments. The lessons learnt and important results of the experimentations results of SmarterLabs became very important for Istanbul Living Lab experimentations.
It was also great for SmarterLabs consortium to exchange the experiences with such a big Metropolitan City, Istanbul to understand how to have a common governance model in all cities.
After the workshop, the attendants of the Workshop visited the Istanbul Living Lab (Zemin Istanbul) venue which is located in the Sishane Metro Station and It will be opened on 15th of August 2018 officially.
The third dissemination workshop of the Project will be organized in Santander in autumn 2018.
For further information about the project please visit https://SmarterLabs.uni-graz.at/en/project-overview/ and watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLCcEySaIQ4
