Smart City in Arnsberg, Menden and Soest

A project consortium from the region of South Westphalia has convinced the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community in its competition ‘Smart Cities made in Germany.‘ Through this application, the consortium received approximately  € 13 million in approved funding in 2019. As a first step, UNITY held a workshop with five municipalities in the consortium to develop a target vision for the framework strategy. In the process, all of the participants were brought on board and they developed a common understanding which then served as a basis for the municipal strategies. UNITY then supported the cities of Arnsberg, Menden and Soest in the development of their individual smart city strategies. In particular, guidelines and projects were defined for an improved quality of life and sustainability. At the same time, UNITY showed how social and technical innovations can be used to successfully shape the development of a smart city. Citizen involvement was a very important element in all three cities as many different formats for innovative citizen participation emerged as a result of this project. The consortium had another goal of implementing an urban data platform to make data available to all citizens in an open format. In addition, the platform enables exciting inter- and intramunicipal use cases, such as in the areas of mobility and the environment. Südwestfalen IT, which has been commissioned for the platform, is working with HYPERTEGRITY AG to develop an open source solution based on the FIWARE smart city standard. This will then be rolled out in the five municipalities and made available to other municipalities at a later date. This basic infrastructure will be an important cornerstone for digital sovereignty in South Westphalia.