City of Kaiserslautern. FIWARE4Cities book ed. 6

In this weekly series, we present to you each time one innovative city on its digital journey and on its way to become smart(er). This time, we have the City of Kaiserslautern for you.

Kaiserslautern: A German City Embracing Smart City Innovations Kaiserslautern, located in southwest Germany, is known for its rich history, contiguous forest area, and large American community. Since 2020, Kaiserslautern has embraced the Smart City concept, aiming to enhance residents’ quality of life through digital technologies and smart devices. This strategy focuses on improving the town for residents, visitors, and workers, rather than just implementing the latest technology.

Collecting data is crucial for this transformation, as it helps understand traffic patterns, energy usage, and public service needs, enabling informed decision-making and efficient resource allocation. Therefore, Kaiserslautern is part of the “Southwest- Cluster,” a group of Smart Cities in Rhineland- Palatinate and Saarland committed to building a collaborative data platform.

This initiative aims to reduce redundancy, optimise resource use, and achieve cost savings. Additionally, it seeks to increase transparency, allowing citizens to access and understand how decisions are made. Through these efforts, Kaiserslautern is positioning itself as a model for smart urban living.

Open Urban Data Platform Southwest-Cluster

Due to the strict principle of federalism in Germany, every municipality is responsible for its own IT Infrastructure. This results in heterogeneous structures, which are very challenging when it comes to the development of data-driven applications. Imagine you are a developer and you intend to create an app, which navigates you to the nearest free parking lot. In addition to the privately operated parking areas, many parking spaces are publicly owned. You would have to ask for the data in all local governments and you would have to deal with a tremendous amount of different technologies and data-formats.

This is a fundamental issue, which slows down digitalization in Germany – at least for the public sector. One approach to overcome this is to agree on data standards like FIWARE Smart Data Models. Kaiserslautern decided to form a cooperation with five other municipalities to build a collaborative Open Source Urban Data Platform, based on the preparatory work by Berlin TXL and Hypertegrity. This “Southwest-Cluster-Cooperation” is currently implementing a joint water level monitoring and a smart traffic management system with FIWARE Smart Data Models as a common standard.