On 05 June 2024, the fourth day of the Build4People delegation trip “Urban sustainability best practices in Germany”, the main activity was a guided visit and expert talk at the CityLAB Berlin, an innovative institution where, according to their website “administration and urban society work together in a participatory way on innovative solutions for the digital Berlin of tomorrow”.
There, we got introduced to different prototype projects of groundbreaking citizen science approaches, stunning video installations, and innovative ways of public participation.
Probably, the most prominent good-practice example is “Gieß den Kiez“, a digital tool which that displays more than 850,000 city trees of Berlin and helps them to survive. By means of this tool you can find info on what kind of trees are in your neighbourhood, their age, the recent levels of precipitation and their need to be watered. In this way it invites all urban citizens to participate in the irrigation & nursing of city trees. Everything is fully open source and uses open data from the city authorities, the German weather service and Open Street Map.
Another project which got introduced was “Stadtpuls”, an open data platform for Internet of Things (IoT) projects, which, among other things, connects everyday objects for more intelligent use. Stadtpuls helps to collect sensor data, visualize it and make it available for further data analysis. This data helps you delve deeper into the world of city sensor technology and better understand your own city. Stadtpuls makes the sensor data freely available and brings together providers such as municipal companies, researchers, school projects, hobbyists and users such as data scientists, data journalists and scientists.
At the end of the guided tour, we had an introduction round of every participants and discussed which kind of approaches might be useful for Phnom Penh city government, as well.
Afterwards, some of the delegation trip participants had a joint walk across the Tempelhofer Feld, a prominent and heavily disputed huge public place of Berlin before heading for joint dinner.
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