Peter Portheine: We are small and therefore we must spend wisely

The smartest district in the world Helmond’s Brandevoort district is developing in the Netherlands based on seven fundamental pillars – circular economy, citizen engagement, mobility, health, energy, digitalization, and security, said Peter Portheine, director of the Dutch Brainport Smart District and CEO of Eindhoven International Project Office, on Thursday at the Smart Cities 2020 conference held at the Zagreb Fair.

He demonstrated how the collaboration of the local community, citizens, private companies, and the academic community is helping the district to ‘grow’ and serve as a ‘living laboratory’, or a testing ground for new smart solutions in the fields of transportation, energy management, lighting, and data processing, and that the lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic was not counterproductive. – Some technologies had been stagnant for years, and now they have been developed and are impacting human lives in just three months – commented Portheine on how the pandemic crisis positively reflected on their project.

He emphasized that Brainport Eindhoven is a small region with 756,000 inhabitants and that when you are small, you have little money and must spend it wisely, which Croatia could also apply. – We have built an ecosystem around the high-tech industry. When we started working on the Brainport project, we tried to venture into specific areas. When you are small, you need to identify where you can be competitive and specialize. Additionally, it is important to develop a good research system and an educational system that can support these innovations – he concluded. He added that the Netherlands is focused on exporting technology and products and is constantly exploring how to develop products that can meet global needs.

– You must test prototypes when developing new technology. If you have a highly innovative product, you need to meet the people who will work with it. If we want to be smart, we need to create a real-life laboratory where we can adapt the product before it goes to market. We are now building a district where 4,000 people will live, which will have 120,000 m2 of business space, 1,500 apartments, 73,000 solar panels…

Currently, over 300 companies are collaborating on the project, and architecture students are creating prototypes that will only be tested by living in them. New solutions are also being tested by offering free accommodation to residents in exchange for collecting data on energy consumption, food consumption, and living habits. Security, citizen participation, and accountability regarding data and citizens’ privacy, as well as the creation of social infrastructure, are more important to them than the technology they are testing because future relationships and the future of the district will be based on that. 

More about the smart district project can be read here.

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