Linking SDG to the territories: Mapping local actions & spaces From Venice to the world, thanks to digital technology that helps imagine fully sustainable cities. MODERATOR Petr Suska, Head of Innovation in the Urban Economy, Fraunhofer IAO The Fraunhofer Institute is the largest applied research organization in Europe. It is nonprofit, funded by the German government that invests about three billion euros in research every year. Lately they have been working on programs and research projects that address the post-Coronavirus period, but Fraunhofer is particularly famous for inventing mp3 files, whose royalties are one of the most significant sources of funding.
Smart urban planning in Eindhoven Erna Polimac, Project Leader on Global Goals and Yunus Balci, Councillor, City of Eindhoven, The Netherlands OVERVIEW • Eindhoven is the fifth largest city in the Netherlands and is located in the south of the country • It is home to numerous companies and start-ups in the tech sector The city of Eindhoven has its own urban development initiative, which is based on cooperation between institutions and local stakeholders and aims to find smart, integrated and innovative solutions to respond to social challenges and improve the quality of life in the region. This initiative, has prepared a digital program for integrated
and sustainable urban planning through tools such as digital twin and virtual reality, in order to make evidence-based decision-making processes and increase the empowerment of citizens. The results of these experiments can be translated into data and knowledge and help identify new and better solutions for the future. Eindhoven’s smart urban planning program consists of four strands (digital twin and virtual reality, tooling area-based management, sensing and citizen-centered services) and identifies social challenges in the city. Because of its size, Eindhoven presents the same issues as large cities with a greater capacity for integrated responses, including through digitization. The technologies are massively available but it is important to find the right application and this is the main purpose of smart urban planning. The digital twin is the key tool in the program but it should be used to visualize the city you want, not as a decision-making tool in itself. Eindhoven tested this tool by applying it to the main challenge of the moment, the health organization in the city centre, and trying to make a connection with the SDGs of the 2030 Agenda. The representation on the map of the city has made it possible to visualize the concrete consequences of the choices made, the possibilities and opportunities present in the neighbourhoods, and increase the participation of citizens helping to create consensus towards local policies and plans. This is a great advantage because the SDGs acquire concreteness in the eyes of citizens. The same methodology has been used to monitor people’s well-being in economic, social and environmental terms, and this regional monitoring has been applied to the city of Eindhoven. We believe that this tool represents a valid thermometer of the situation and can provide useful data when decisions have to be made, while not replacing the perceptions and feelings of the people who live in the city. Finally, always through the digital twin the contribution of the city to the achievement of the SDGs was mapped and it was possible to view the overview of policies and projects 59
