A New Home for Smart City Ideas: TechLab Pulheim Opens Its Doors
On 15 October 2026, the new TechLab Pulheim was inaugurated in a former rolling mill. It is set to become a meeting place for citizens, schools, businesses and the city, and the stage where Pulheim students will present their Young Smart Cities projects in December.
Paintings on the walls, sculptures in the corners, a self-built 3D printer surrounded by circuit diagrams. A few steps further, cutaway models of fire hydrants and water valves reveal what usually stays hidden beneath our streets, next to a charging station for electric cars. The TechLab Pulheim, hosted in the “Atelier im Walzwerk”, is not a typical tech space. It is where technology, craftsmanship, art and the infrastructure of the city meet, and that is exactly the point.
An association for a learning city
The lab was created by TechLab Pulheim e.V., an association founded for this purpose and chaired by Prof. Dr. Martin Wortmann. At the opening, he explained its guiding idea: low-threshold access to education for everyone, combined with citizen participation in the development of their city.
The TechLab wants to act as a bridge between the city administration, science, civil society, schools and local businesses. It will host round tables, workshops, seminars and talks, and offer access to new technologies. Smart cities and urban development will be a central theme, inspired by the idea of a “learning city” where technological change is shaped together with the people who live there.
Young Smart Cities on stage
The Young Smart Cities project was also presented during the opening. Its core message fitted the evening perfectly: a smart city is not a city where technology controls everything, but one where citizens develop solutions together, and where young people, who will live in and shape the cities of tomorrow, have a voice.
In Pulheim, this is already happening. The Abtei-Gymnasium Pulheim is one of the partners of the Young Smart Cities project, and its students are not just using the platform: they are helping to build it. They contributed to writing three of its Knowledge Pills, the learning units at the heart of the platform, on sustainable energy in cities, data collection, analysis and use, and urban planning. These units are now used by schools across Europe.
Now the students have taken the next step. Working with Project-Based Learning, they are developing their own Learning Situations on real challenges in Pulheim, starting from Driving Questions they chose themselves.
Save the date: 4 December 2026
The results will be presented right here. On 4 December 2026, the Abtei-Gymnasium students will return to the TechLab to share their proposals and discuss them with representatives of the City of Pulheim and other local stakeholders.
For the students, it is a chance to show that their ideas can matter outside the classroom. For the city, it is a chance to listen to the people who will live in the Pulheim of tomorrow.
From Pulheim to Europe
With the TechLab, Pulheim gains a local space that is also connected to Europe. Through the Abtei-Gymnasium and Young Smart Cities, the city is part of a network of schools and organisations in Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland, all working on the same question: how can young people help make their cities smarter and more sustainable?
