About the ingredients in the secret sauce of smart cities: Learning from urban innovation and co-creation practices

GIZ as a globally acting agency for development cooperation supports many national, regional, and municipal bodies on their way to implementing more sustainable and smarter strategies to enable future successes in the global competition of cities and regions. Over the last decades, many smart cities and national urban development policies around the world have been supported and smart cities’ approaches have been extracted. Cities are built for its people and by its people. Two aspects are obvious to be of importance for successful and future-oriented smart urban development strategies: innovation and co-creation.

While networking in a hybrid way we want to look at some examples from national to local level and work out what constitutes successful – sustainable – innovation and co-creation: What are innovation laboratories good for? How are good innovation management processes structured? Which basic requirements – funding, community managers, technical support – do they need? We will learn from examples from approaches on national level in Germany and Mexico, from a municipal point of view in Brazil, how the BMZ digilab aims at bringing together the public and private sector, and from the International Smart Cities Network on how to support co-creation on a neighbourhood level through open-source market solutions.