SmartCity-Summit.Niederrhein Presents Data-Driven, Digital, and Innovative Solutions for the Fourth Time
The day before, the Regional Conference Smart Cities had already taken place.
For two days, Mönchengladbach was the meeting place for smart city experts. On March 12 and 13, the focus was on the digital and connected city of tomorrow through lectures, workshops, and exhibition stands. The event kicked off on Wednesday with the Regional Conference Smart Cities hosted by the Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development, and Building (BMWSB), which this year took place in Mönchengladbach. The SmartCity-Summit Niederrhein, firmly rooted in Mönchengladbach, followed on Thursday for its fourth edition, recording a new participant record with more than 600 registrations. Both events were held at the Redbox in Nordpark.
It became clear at the SmartCity-Summit’s opening that smart city developments are not an end in themselves. “It’s about identifying the needs of the people,” emphasized Mayor Felix Heinrichs, referring specifically to the CitizenLabs project. Starting this summer, this “laboratory environment” will be launched in Mönchengladbach, physically located in the central library. The goal is to involve citizens early in the development of digital administrative services to tailor the offerings as best as possible to their target audience.
After the opening, the SmartCityApp—currently in development and also being developed with citizen involvement—was presented on the main stage. In addition, there were presentations on artificial intelligence, security aspects surrounding the smart city, digital twins, and many other topics. Besides the main stage, the “Speakers Corner” provided space for presentations, while “Workshop Classes” allowed participants to engage more deeply with specific topics.
Smart City You Can Experience in the Expo Area
A highlight of the conference each year is the 5,000-square-meter exhibition area showcasing municipal smart city solutions alongside offerings and innovations from the private sector. Examples included overarching data platforms that integrate various data sources and technical solutions such as measuring urban visitor flows via public Wi-Fi—already in practice in Mönchengladbach.
At many booths, the smart city was made tangible. For instance, the Mönchengladbach Smart City Team demonstrated via a LEGO model with mini-sensors where data is collected across the city and fed into a dashboard. Next to it were much larger sensors, already installed in large numbers in Nordpark and connected to the city’s LoRaWAN network to provide traffic and environmental data. With an increasingly detailed data basis and targeted analyses, this information will be used in the future to forecast, monitor, and control traffic flows.
Also present was a team from the municipal service portal. Already, 90% of the municipal administrative services defined by the Online Access Act are digitally available in Mönchengladbach. A very impressive exhibit was the digital twin stand. Here, a virtual clone of the city is being created, whose three-dimensional nature significantly improves participation in planning processes. The twin is already accessible in Mönchengladbach’s geoportal. But Mönchengladbach is not the only place advancing smart city efforts; partner cities Krefeld, Aachen, and Dormagen also presented their progress.
Often, robots provide concrete benefits in smart city projects—and so they were also part of the SmartCity-Summit, whether virtually as chatbots or as real machines. For example, the Mönchengladbach airport, the city’s hospitals, and the Dr. Stein laboratory showcased a drone type that, as part of a pilot project, will rapidly transport medical samples from hospitals to laboratories. The municipal utility company, mags, exhibited a fully automated watering robot acquired through the Smart-in-the-Park project. Starting in spring, it will take over watering duties at the main cemetery and later also in the Bunten Garten park.
About the SmartCity-Summit.Niederrhein
The first edition of the SmartCity-Summit.Niederrhein in 2021 marked the launch of an innovative event series aimed at placing Mönchengladbach on the national smart city map. The summit is organized by the City of Mönchengladbach through its Smart City department, the Marketing Society Mönchengladbach, the economic development agency, the utility company NEW, and mags.
