Four separate parties (the Municipality of The Hague, Leiden University, Delft University of Technology and The Hague University of Applied Sciences) have joined forces in a new partnership. They aim to work towards the establishment of a Knowledge Lab, in which researchers, lecturers, officials, international guests, doctoral candidates and graduating students will be jointly studying the city of the future.
As part of this partnership, the city of The Hague is working to develop a Central Innovation District (CID). Recently a call for proposals was launched to submit ideas on how The Hague can accumulate knowledge for the CID. Metabolism of Cities teamed up with the Centre for Sustainability at Leiden University to participate in this call for proposals.
The project that was submitted focuses on the organization of an urban metabolism data hackathon. During this hackathon, participants will upload datasets that are related to urban resource stocks and flows, or other data related to urban metabolism. This information will be loaded into the MultipliCity project, which will be tailored to suit the type of information that is of interest to the CID and that is relevant to The Hague. After the event the submitted data will be further processed, visualized, and made available through the MultipliCity project, and outreach activities will be undertaken in The Hague to let relevant parties know about this new tool. Depending on the results of this initial hackathon, Metabolism of Cities and the Centre for Sustainability will look into continuing these efforts and further expanding the datasets and use of this information.
The project was well-received by the jury and has been awarded funding to run this hackathon. We are excited about this opportunity and look forward to embedding The Hague into our platform, with the help of our partners at Leiden University. The hackathon is currently scheduled to take place some time in September, and all the follow-up work will be done before the end of the year. We will report on the next steps as we work on this project.
Metabolism of Cities