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To promote the digital development of Heidelberg, the Digital-Agentur Heidelberg was founded. The agency's goal is to develop sustainable, intelligent, and digital urban development in the context of the urban ecosystem consisting of research, industry, small and medium-sized businesses, and stakeholders. With the Heidelberg City Kompass, citizens are able to access the most important information from the city via a web portal corresponding use cases from various fields of action, including the environment, health, and mobility.
greenApes was founded in 2012 with the mission to reinforce individual incentives for sustainable living via digital solutions.
A new approach to data sharing outlined by the European Commission (EC) last week could accelerate smart city initiatives. Potential benefits include more advanced solutions to climate change, health and mobility challenges; better ability to port innovation between cities; and new personalised services for residents.
Data-driven smart cities are rapidly emerging across various parts of the world, becoming more attractive places to live. These cities are heavily reliant on open data and yet, in reality, data is still published in an unusable way for the majority of data analysis that needs to take place.
Both citizens and city officials can benefit from the platform’s web services that facilitate daily activities, ranging from urban mobility to environmental monitoring. The platform gives access to readily organised and visualised information, without the need to go through raw data. This provides the city with unparalleled transparency across policy areas for monitoring and benchmarking, while promoting citizen participation in shaping the future of the city.
Cities and communities around the world are looking for ways to harness innovative services and to make the digital transformation impactful for the public administration and the citizens. The guide to SynchroniCity is now offering support to set the foundations for a sustainable digital transformation – validated by 21 cities across Europe in a 3-year project and adopted by the more than 150 member cities of the Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) network.
In the era of digital technology, data is becoming a key resource for urban governance and a major political and legal challenge for public institutions, which are destabilized by the rise of new players – specifically from the platform economy. The increasing production of data is the source of numerous challenges for public and private actors alike, especially as regards the accumulation and use of data and the creation of value that can be derived from it. La Fabrique de la Cité spoke with Antoine Courmont, researcher in political science, scientific director of the Cities and tech Chair at Sciences Po, and co-author of Gouverner la ville numérique (Governing the digital city), a book published in August 2019.
Everybody who’s professionally involved in technology in cities and communities agrees that the debate on digital rights has moved beyond the implementation of smart technologies. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) turned ‘Privacy’ into a hot topic, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal catapulted the debate on ethical use of data high up the political agenda.
As a result of this global politicisation of digital affairs, local councils are increasingly becoming aware of their political power to decide and shape the digital development of their cities. For example, 5G infrastructures are not a matter of ‘neutral smart city efficiency’; city councils across the world – the closest democratic representatives of citizens – have a choice how and which data can be collected and by whom.
Interactive Cities, an URBACT network that explored how digital, social media and user generated content can improve today´s urban management in European cities, whatever size. This challenge has been tackled in two ways. Firstly, as an opportunity to redefine and deepen the concept of citizenship and civic engagement today, providing a path to spark cohesion, commonalities and shared value as well as increasing sense of place. In other words, making the most of the new channels to revisit the relationship between the individual and the local community in the digital era. Secondly, as a way to improve the quality of public services, in terms of efficiency and transparency, and even widen the current service chart provided by local authorities.
A proposed ePrivacy regulation currently under discussion at EU level would hurt new business models in the clean energy sector, which are “almost all” based on the collection and treatment of data by home equipment and smart meters, warns an industry coalition.
Fifteen years ago, Zaragoza - the historic Spanish city situated between Madrid and Barcelona - pioneered a vision of a future digital district and knowledge-based society. Since then, the city has developed an impressive portfolio of smart city projects and new urban services. According to Daniel Sarasa, Urban Innovation Planner in Zaragoza and internationally recognized smart city innovator, one of Zaragoza's unique strengths is its culture of citizen involvement and participation. This culture has its roots in the reawakening of democracy. In the late 1970s, the city of Zaragoza (like other cities in Spain) looked back on thirty five years of dictatorship – and looked ahead to an uncertain future. During the years of dictatorship, Zaragoza had grown in population from approximately 235,000 to more than 500,000, but the civic infrastructure and public services needed to support this urban growth were inhibited by an autocratic national government which maintained severe austerity measures.
A conversation with Helsinki Mayor Vapaavuori and James Anderson In a wide-ranging conversation, the Mayor discusses how he works to encourage citizen-driven innovation; how Helsinki has embraced the idea of the city as a “test bed” – ensuring that companies and entrepreneurs can test their products with citizens; and his dedication to encouraging risk-taking in a city known for long-term planning.
Sir Nigel Shadbolt, chairman of the Open Data Institute, explains how governments have got to change the narrative when it comes to data.
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Technological change is a crucial aspect for achieving the green economy and fostering green growth, with open source software promoting collaboration in urban centres to solve climate change and resource scarcity challenges.
In a context where digital giants are increasingly influencing the actions decided by public policies, smart data platforms are a tool for collecting a great deal of information on the territory and a means of producing effective public policies to meet contemporary challenges, improve the quality of the city, and create new services. Within the framework of the Smarter Together project, the cities of Lyon (France), Munich (Germany), and Vienna (Austria) have integrated this tool into their city’s metabolism and use it at different scales. Nevertheless, the principle remains the same: the collection (or even dissemination) of internal and external data to the administration will enable the communities, companies, not-for-profit organizations, and civic administrations to “measure” the city and identify areas for improvement in the territory. Furthermore, through open data logics, public authorities can encourage external partners to become actors in territorial action by using findings from the data to produce services that will contribute to the development of the territory and increase the quality of the city and its infrastructure. Nevertheless, based on data that is relatively complex to extract and process, public data platforms raise many legal, technical, economic, and social issues. The cities either avoided collecting personal data or when dealing with sensitive data, use anonymized aggregated data. Cocreation activities with municipal, commercial, civil society stakeholders, and citizens adopted the strategies and tools of the intelligent data platforms to develop new urban mobility and government informational services for both citizens and public authorities. The data platforms are evolving for transparent alignment with 2030 climate-neutrality objectives while municipalities strive for greater agility to respond to disruptive events like the COVID-19 pandemic.
How FIWARE is driving the development of smart digital solutions in a faster, easier, interoperable and affordable way that avoids vendor lock-in scenarios.
The Digital Twin concept is the latest technology dominating the smart city hype cycle. While the technology has already been around for decades in engineering, thanks to more powerful processing and cloud storage, it has now entered the realm of city planning.
In his recent study "Spatial Information and the Legibility of Urban Form: Big Data in Urban Morphology" urban planner and University of Southern California professor Geoff Boeing discusses urban exploration based on big data and argues that raw data has no pragmatic application, asserting that it is necessary to translate and compress large quantities of data in order to produce valuable, legible information that can be accessed and understood by the general public.
Basing his work on the visual relevance of planning, his article analyzes the collaboration between two programs to transform data into simplified information. The first program he looks at is OpenStreetMap (OSM), a worldwide cartography community and online geospatial information system that serves as a free-access high quality database of the world's urban street networks. The second program, OSMnx, is a Python packet for analyzing data that allows researchers and other professionals to easily download information on streets, buildings, and services, automatically transforming the information into graphics. These are just two examples of massive amounts of data being rendered into images and comprehensive maps.
The Publications Office of the European Union and the European Commission have just launched the fourth edition of the EU Datathon. The competition aims to show the potential of public data produced by EU institutions.
In September, the local authorities of Bratislava launched the capital’s first open data portal. It is now completely ready for public use, having recently been filled up with data from different national and local government ministries, agencies and institutions including the Interior Ministry, the National Statistical Office, the Bratislava Municipal Police, the Bratislava Tourist Board, the Bratislava Transport company and many others.
Over 420 datasets have already been uploaded to the city’s open data portal, ready to be perused by anyone interested in the information they contain.
Un « lab » sur les données énergie a été créé pour développer de la connaissance sur les données de consommation locale d’énergie afin qu’elles puissent être mobilisées efficacement pour le bénéfice de la transition énergétique dans les territoires.
Les collectivités territoriales sont en première ligne dans la lutte contre le changement climatique. Elles jouent un rôle clef dans la maîtrise des consommations d’énergie et la promotion des énergies renouvelables. La mise à disposition des données d’énergie, rendue possible par la loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte, a positionné les territoires au cœur de l’action.
La connaissance de la consommation locale d'énergie est donc un maillon important de la transition énergétique. Les données d’énergie sont essentielles pour l’élaboration des plans climat-air-énergie territoriaux et permettent, par exemple, de diagnostiquer les consommations énergétiques dans les territoires, d’aider à la planification des nouvelles orientations énergétiques comme les énergies renouvelables.
Pour aller plus loin, le « lab » va traiter deux axes prioritaires contribuant directement au développement et à l’utilisation des données :
- La mise en place progressive d'un nouveau dispositif plus complet d'accès aux données énergies, intégré à la plateforme nationale « data.gouv.fr ».
- La création d'une boite à outils « socle » pour les collectivités locales afin de les accompagner dans la préparation de leur plan climat-air-énergie.
The FIWARE Foundation and TM Forum – the global not-for-profit association focused on digital transformation – announced a joint collaboration program to support the adoption of a reference architecture and compatible common data models that underpin a digital market of interoperable and replicable solutions for smart cities. The cities of Vienna (Austria), Nice, Saint Quentin (France), Genoa (Italy), Utrecht (Netherlands), Porto (Portugal) Santander, Valencia (Spain), Gothenburg (Sweden), La Plata (Argentina), Montevideo (Uruguay) have joined the program, with an open invitation to other cities to join.
Vienna has been steadily rolling out blockchain use to validate and secure the city’s Open Government Data, including public transport routes, train schedules and voting results, according to a recent announcement.
The city has been working with EY since December 2017 on a pilot to simplify and automate administrative processes as part of the city’s digitalisation initiative, DigitalCity.Wien.
Until now, 350 datasets have been secured on the blockchain networks. One of the first to be launched in Europe, the networks secure official documents by storing hashes of the data sets on public blockchains, allowing city employees as well as citizens to review the documents’ authenticity, when they were created, and when and if the data was modified.
Using the web as a distribution platform of contextualised data will allow us to distribute content, and filter datasets that are disconnected by design. Through machine-readable definitions and uniform resource identifiers (URIs), government-managed datasets become anchor points, allowing external data providers to add their content to those concepts. This allows for a more extensive knowledge graph based on linking data to content, rather than coupling on a technical level. As this is distributed over the Internet, there is no limit to possible links with other cities, government levels, companies, civil society and others.
Taking Munich’s crown The City of Barcelona is migrating its computer systems away from Windows making it the poster child for Open Source rather than Munich which is frantically trying to migrate back.
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