Smart city start-up Hawa Dawa uses high-resolution environmental data to improve the air quality and livability of cities. Based on her experience, Head of Sales, Janina Stork, is well-positioned to provide insights into the complexity of transforming a traditional city into a smart city.
As the smart city sector is highly fragmented and lacks comprehensive strategies, real change has been slow to take hold. In order to speed up the process and foster a digital mindset, Janina Stork proposes a 3-step strategy toward developing a smart city.
The prerequisite for this is a holistic approach – away from the ring-fenced responsibilities of individual offices and ministries and towards a more unified approach, which could be based on the agile, product-oriented practices of software companies, in which all teams are geared to the same set of objectives. Once in place, these practices create a solid foundation for each step in the transformation to a smart city.
The smart city concept is based on a holistic approach. Cities cover only 2% of the earth’s surface, but are responsible for 95% of all emissions – with serious consequences for the entire planet. That’s why the right approach is crucial for sustainable change, which if successful, will ensure higher productivity, improved health and better quality of life for city dwellers.
Hawa Dawa shows how cities can be analyzed and positively transformed thanks to smart solutions. The environmental data the company collects, in this case primarily data on air quality, are a key element for enabling decisions. These data provide a completely new understanding of the city based on its air quality – and thus create a valid basis for innovative and strategic approaches.
Business Development Manager / Corporate Strategy, Messe München