Our last POCACITO in Germany tour led us to Frankfurt, Cologne and Aachen to explore how people in these cities create spaces for sustainable innovation and become smart cities.
Together, we explored how German cities are pushing green and social innovation and smart city solutions. The program toke place from March 1 to 7, 2020.
POCACITO in Germany was supported financially through a European Recovery Program (ERP) grant from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi). 2020 was our final POCACITO in Germany program.
We are now exploring new ways to continue POCACITO. Please send us your ideas and inspirations.
Frankfurt
We met with Susanne Petry from Pier F, an incubator and future hub in Frankfurt, and also with Florian Unger and Nathalie Kohlschütter from the city’s climate and energy department, Carolin Hendrys and Hannes Utikal from Provadis University, and a number of start-ups in the green and social sphere such as Daniel Anthes from Knärzje, Jenny Fuhrmann from packaging-free store gramm.genau, touring the passive apartment building Aktivhaus by ABG with Frank Junker, hearing about right.based on science ghg accounting start-up and last but not least meeting Alexander Klein from the Green Bank KfW.
A very special event was our evening with Friends of the Earth Germany Youth group Hessen / BUNDjugend Hessen.
And just before leaving, we visited the Einzigware social upcycling project.
Cologne
In Cologne, we toured the GrowSmarter project of SmartCityCologne, explored the food rescue store https://www.the-good-food.de/ and met Rebecca Göckel and Jan Grabow, the founders at NOMOO vegan ice cream which resulted not only in sampling their product but also in an actual hip hop jam session.
Aachen
Our final stop on the tour led us to the historic city of Aachen, most famous for Charlemagne. Besides touring the city, we also explored the surrounding energy landscape of concentrated solar-power, a solar tower, open-cast lignite mines, before meeting with the affordable electric vehicle start-up e.GO an offspring of RWTH Aachen technical university.
A big thank you to all presenters, speakers and to the entire POCACITO community for making this happen.
Please find select presentations below: