hofer.Land digital: Pilot Project Smart Cities
Consulting Services for the County Hof
source: Landkreis Hof, 2021
In 2020, the County of Hof in Franconia/Bavaria, successfully applied for funding in the national programme "Smart Cities Model Projects". The funding programme supports municipalities and communities in developing an integrated strategy for digital transformation and digital tools to create sustainable services ("Smart Services") as well as exemplary projects, places and infrastructure. The programme's goal is to enable and promote municipalities to become more capable in the use of new digital technologies serving their communities and the common good.
Supported by the 90% funding of around €17 million, the County of Hof is pursuing the goal of developing cross-sector digital strategies for the future of urban and rural life by testing prototypical measures with high value, consequently to be scaled elsewhere.
In the first phase (until 2022) of the awarded project, the County of Hof is developing the strategy for digitalisation in the sense of integrated sustainable and inter-communal urban development under the national theme "common good and network city / city network" with the involvement of the 27 municipal partners and stakeholders from various areas and societal interest groups.
In the second funding phase, but also parallel to the strategy development, the implementation of the first prototypical digitalisation projects is taking place. The focus here is on solutions that respond to pressing local challenges and generate spatial impacts and enhanced quality of life and serve the financial and governance capacity of all municipalities, cities and markets. The findings of the implementation projects flow into the national knowledge transfer and will be scaled to other counties and cities with comparable challenges as well as spatial and social conditions.
The project office "hoferLand.digital" manages the model project for the County of Hof and bundles the activities, network partners and digitalisation approaches as an agile, open and self-learning system and network hub.
Creative Climate Cities is supporting the process in organisational consulting for the strategic development phase of the Smart City Project. For the initiation of the strategy phase, CCC is supporting in the development of a joint vision and in prioritising the fields of action with the use of interviews and design sprint workshops with representative stakeholders. As a result, a concrete roadmap for the strategic development plan, including Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), will be defined and participation guidelines will be outlined.
