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Zurich – Digitalization allows cities to be more self-organizing, and Zurich has the best conditions for this, experts said during a discussion at the Zurich Chamber of Commerce and the Association of Zurich Trading Companies.

Self-responsibility is one of the values that Zurich has pushed forward with, according to Regine Sauter, director of the Zurich Chamber of Commerce (ZHK). Liberal framework conditions have always made it possible to discuss rules and boundaries, added the national councillor from Zurich at a New Year’s 2018 event, which was organized for the first time by the ZHK and the Association of Zurich Trading Companies (VZH).    This freedom is a prerequisite for smart cities, and the discussion participants were optimistic that their vision of the city of the future will become a reality. Traffic was a key issue – and symbolic of how a decentralized self-organization can function. Dirk Helbing, Professor of Computational Social Science at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, called for greater courage to experiment. Public transport and self-driving forms of demand responsive transit could soon form a collective, while data pools have already enabled individualized services. “We have to do something – 80 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions are produced in cities,” said Helbing. His vision is that of a self-organizing city that takes into account the needs of every citizen with the help of digitalization.   Particularly in the case of a functioning infrastructure the path is clear for future models to be developed together with the population, said Karin Tausz, head of the autonomous vehicles programme at the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). “Zurich has a very good starting position for participatory urban development,” said Tausz, explaining that social innovation counts in addition to technical innovation. And even if the SBB is a mobility provider, real estate owner and developer all in one, individual companies will not be able to cope with upheavals. “It is about cooperation,” added Tausz.