Munich calls for intelligent urban solutions

With new pilot projects and call for solutions, Munich is ramping up its focus on smart cities solutions. The Bavarian capital is calling for solutions to address some of its key challenges within the sustainable urban agenda. In a nutshell, Danish companies looking to Germany should keep an eye out for the following market openings in the city:

Tourism

In 2019, hotels across Munich had well above 8.8 million guests with 18 million overnight stays in total. As day visitors and tourists play a positive role for the city’s CO2 footprint, the focus on sustainable offers for the tourism industry is constantly increasing.  Via new smart solutions, Munich hope to calculate and compare CO2 footprints during tourists’ stay as a way of while motivating visitors to more sustainable behavior and consumption.

Emission free mobility

Every year, each of Munich’s 1.5 million inhabitants emit almost 6.1 tonnes of CO2. A large part comes from private passenger transport. This leaves the city with an important question; how can the citizens of Munich be motivated to use emission-free forms of transport?

In order to foster resonance and support amongst Munich’s city dwellers, a key objective is to avoid additional burdens. Therefore, the city has launched projects to identify creative and innovative solutions that integrate emission-free modes of transport into citizens’ everyday lives. Solutions must appeal broadly across population groups, and preferably at district level.

Air quality

It is important for the city of Munich to assess and test the possibilities for creating measuring units that can be expanded with standardized digital and “minimum viable” sensors to measure air quality (including the NO2 level). By doing this, Munich aims to gather valid data that can be included in the city council’s planning and future initiatives to improve air quality. In addition, the sensors must be able to measure other pollutants that are relevant for air quality (i.e. fine dust fractions PM10 and PM2.5; ozone, benzene, etc.)

Smart traffic

The city of Munich wants to explore ways of collecting traffic data in a new and improved way. Especially by analyzing traffic to plan and control traffic in a more sustainable and city-friendly way. Today, data collection systems already make their contribution to traffic planning itself, but there is still room for improvement. Not least increasedintegration of data sources, whichis crucial in helping Munich towards its ambition of becoming a ‘Smart City’. It is a general requirement that solutions cover all modes of transport with scalability of the entire metropolitan area.

Work from home – or on the go

In Munich, the future of workplaces is seen to be both flexible and independent of its location. Therefore, the City Council is looking into digital tools that can enable work from home or on the go in a more efficient and smart manner. It is expected that the demand for office spaces will fall while new business opportunities for flexible/rentable office spaces will rise. The projection is that digital tools and apps can help creating a transparent system where the citizens may find available desk spaces and book them on the fly. Besides reducing traffic and improve commuter mobility, this will have a major impact on the urban space itself. Essentially, a more flexible balance between work and private life.

Right now, your digital solutions can be tested in selected teams in the district administration department as part of the Open innovation call that Munich is currently offering. It is a requirement that solutions meet the GDPR requirements of the Data Protection Act.

If you are interested in hearing more about these Smart Cities initiatives and how you as a Danish company can come into play, please get in touch with ACCESS CITIES MÜNCHEN.