CoCreateMYCITY Delft

A seemingly endless stream of cyclists at regular hours every day… sounds familiar? Three teams of South-African and Dutch students analysed this problem at the studentchallenge CoCreateMYCITY Delft. The solutions? A Delft Cycling Festival with a cycling simulator, real-time information about bridge opening and closing times, and Delft Zuid Station as the newest coolest hang-out.

Challenges
In multidisciplinary and multicultural teams South-African and Dutch students worked together on three challenges, identified by the city of Delft. How can we make international students comfortable with cycling, and help them understand traffic rules and find their way in Delft? How to improve the cycle track permeability and smartness for the students travelling from/to TU Delft? And can the Delft Zuid station play a more important role in reducing the stream of cyclist from Delft Central Station to the TU Delft Campus and back? During the week in Delft the teams did field visits to analyse the challenges and test their ideas and solutions. Under the guidance of TU Delft experts from the Rotterdam-based company ‘Noorderwind CO’ they came up with concept solutions. On the final day, they pitched these solutions to the city of Delft, vice-rector R. Mudde and other stakeholders.

Solutions
For international students, the proposed solution is a Delft Cycling Festival with a virtual reality cycling simulator. There, the students can learn how to cycle, understand all the spoken and unspoken traffic rules and learn how to find their way around the city. Another team proposed to show bridge opening and closing times of four important bridges in Delft on digital, real-time information on display boards. 

The winning pitch
The winning team focussed on integrating Delft Zuid in their solution. Of the 26,000 TU-students, 13,000 students travel to Delft every day. Almost all of them travel through Delft Central Station, and just a small minority goes to the Delft Zuid station that is much closer to campus. The winning pitch proposed to make Delft Zuid Station a TU Delft Station, and at the same time the newest coolest hang-out. There are already plans to upgrade the station; why not make it attract masses of students to the station to get off there? The route to Campus should be made clear, colourful and attractive, thus making it legible how to get to campus from the Delft Zuid Station. 

About CoCreateMYCITY
In 2017, the Netherlands Embassy in South Africa together with TU Delft | Global Initiative organised CoCreateMYCITY Durban, with 10 South African and 10 Dutch students working together on local challenges in the city of Durban. At the end of June 2018 there was the follow-up: CoCreateMYCITY Delft. In collaboration with the city of Delft the students aimed to find tangible, innovative solutions to urban challenges in the city in the Transport & Logistics sector.  This is a key sector to the smart cities concept, which impacts urbanisation patterns of the future.