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Piazza's citizen debate: Autonomous cars in our lives? January 27, 5 different French cities, over 500 people.

Piazza's citizen debate: Autonomous cars in our lives? January 27, 5 different French cities, over 500 people.

Piazza

Piazza, a 2017 Innovation Activity at EIT Digital, is hosting a national Citizens' Debate in France on driverless vehicles next Saturday, January 27, 2018. Taking place in 5 different cities, the event is organised by Missions Publiques in partnership with public authorities and private actors in order to imagine the future of European mobility and how self-driving vehicles will tackle citizens' lives.

Piazza is a multipurpose co-creation platform for local or global citizen involvement. It equips the city or global organisation not only with digital tools but also provides a methodology to anticipate and resolve their challenges.

Considering the key importance of this topic for European cities, Piazza decided to start taking into account the citizens’ opinion, starting by one big day event in France. During the whole day, a total of 500 people will exchange visions together on multi-sites about future mobility, artificial intelligence and discover, think and contribute to this debate. It will take place in the following urban areas: Conflans Sainte-Honorine, La Rochelle, Paris, Rennes, Sophia-Antipolis and Toulouse.

What will they talk about?

Driverless vehicles and beyond, the future of all our mobility is in question. The subject won’t be too technical to be treated by non-specialists, on the contrary, the central subject is not technology but its possible uses. The voice will be given to everybody on what do we want to achieve and how technologies can help us.

Stéphane Péan, Digital Cities Action Line Leader asserted: “Civic techs market is fragmented, very competitive and use cases are often too local. As a result, the business sustainability is quite fragile. With Piazza, we provide a participatory platform that targets global debates needs. Citizens' life is nowadays much more engaged into global trends and local authorities are also scaling-up. It is time to involve the citizens at the right scale!”

Yves Mathieu, Missions Publliques, said: “During these debates, we witness moments of emotion from the participants provoked by the awareness of our collective competence, of our power to act together for our future. As a citizen, we have little opportunities to contribute to impact our policies. To open such a space is to release a positive democratic emotion.

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EIT Digital's Innovation Activities deliver new products or services, create startups and spinoffs to commercialise outputs from projects, and encourage the transfer of technologies for market entry.

Piazza is one of the 11 Innovation Activities of the Digital Cities Action Line for 2017. This Action Line leverages the digital transformation of the cities through centralised, participative and collaborative interactions between city actors: government, city service providers, industry, and citizens. This transformation enables the deployment of disruptive information, mobility and safety services in the cities.

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