# Campus City Project: Challenge Living Lab for Smart Cities
###### Abstract
Inspired by the RIE results and the above-mentioned needs, the transformation of the Tecnologico de Monterrey university's main campus in the city of Monterrey, Mexico, and of its neighboring communities was established as a key part of its strategic plan for 2020: to generate sustainable spaces and sustainable conditions for RIE. This project, called Distrito Tec, focuses on enabling the creation of a dynamic, safe and inspiring community, one that attracts and retains talent while promoting the development and positioning of the city and the country in general. Distrito Tec's objective is to improve the urban area and the quality of life of nearby communities (with over 26,333 residents). This includes offering open and renewed spaces, as well as access to different campus facilities and social programs. The inherent challenges of the Monterrey campus' transformation into a smart community represents the perfect opportunity for its students to develop the competencies needed to assess various real-life industrial and environmental problems and to understand key concepts of a Smart City [26]. This particular plan to use the Smart Campus concept as a learning mechanism for students within the Distrito Tec project is called the Campus City initiative. The main objectives of this initiative are: (1) to establish the idea among the student community that the campus is their home and that, as its citizens, it is their responsibility to take care of it; (2) to establish a relationship between the university's researchers and professional students to jointly develop solutions through the application of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM); (3) to propose solutions that improve the citizens' experience under the premise \"society, planet, profit\" (triple bottom line) through research, applied research, innovation and collaboration; and (4) to create a living laboratory (Challenge Living Lab) where teachers systematically identify, define and implement learning challenges based on the main problems that cities face. The Campus City initiative involves collaboration between the university's academic community, industries and the government, using Tecnologico de Monterrey's infrastructure of innovation laboratories to answer the main research question: how to promote a scalable Smart City framework that also provides a learning environment to engage and motivate students while helping them develop the necessary competencies to solve the smart community's Pain Points through innovation. Additionally, Tecnologico de Monterrey launched its new educational model \"Tec21\" in August 2019, with \"Challenge-Based Learning\" (CBL) as its central axis, where the definition and development of real-world challenges are used to guide and accelerate the learning process. Tec21 [27; 28] is a unique and customizable model that promotes the development of competitive, competent individuals that can tackle any real-world challenge through research and innovation. This is catalyzed by inspiring professors who employ significant real-life challenges that motivate and engage students to create a memorable experience and trigger the learning process that is vital for their formation. Fundamentally, the Tec21 educational model could be described as a student-centered model characterized by four main components/pillars: (a) challenge-based learning, (b) flexibility, (c) highly trained and inspiring professors and, (d) memorable educational experiences [28; 29; 30]. All undergraduate programs at Tecnologico de Monterrey follow this disruptive model, which has been implemented in all 26 Tecnologico de Monterrey campuses with promising results regarding its implementation and the students' learning experience [31; 32; 33]. Therefore, this work answers the need for a Smart Campus City framework which could be used as a base model to be scaled up and applied in a Smart City, while developing competent professionals prepared to face these challenges.