I am happy to tell that I have recently started a set of collaboration posts in the blog of Smart Cities Global.
My first article there is called The city-platform: seamless services for Smart Cities and tries to raise the attention on the need of promoting common shared data platforms for the collection and reuse of urban data in cities. This means more than just sharing information, it is a step forward to overcome a siloed way of working in public administrations, to rationalise resources and to start establishing fruitful collaboration with third parties.
Here is the transcription of the article, you can read the original here:
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The city-platform: seamless services for Smart Cities
Against a backdrop of deep economic crisis, budget cuts and continuous population growth, cities face a major challenge: how to guarantee service delivery with fewer resources and growing demand.
The solution might well come from rationalisation and collaboration with third parties.
In today’s restrictive climate, a new city concept is being born: a city model that relies on intensive use of new technologies to allow more creativity in services delivery and, above all, more efficiency. These are the so-called smart cities.
One of the pillars of the smart cities concept is to broaden knowledge of urban dynamics in order to be able to monitor and predict possible future behaviours and events. At the same time, the proactive capacity of cities depends upon the availability of reliable urban data (data generated in the urban space by citizens and systems) in real-time.
The applications of such data are tremendous. For example, monitoring traffic by connecting sensors to traffic lights helps in adapting green or red light times to the density of the traffic at certain points of the city at certain times, while equipping trash containers with sensors that notify authorities when they are full can help optimise collection routes.
But to enable such systems to succeed, the collection and reuse of urban data calls for a common shared data platform. This platform would close the connection line between citizens moving and interacting with each other and their surroundings, and the data generated by their actions.
To maximise their potential and ensure future system stability, common urban management platforms should contain as much of the information generated in the city as possible. All information collected by the different departments of the municipality should be inserted into the platform and shared – which means overcoming traditional approaches to data collection and storage, where different public departments rarely shared their databases.
At the same time, urban data platforms must be the unique information providers for public services, closing the data re-utilisation circle. Services would feed data from and to a single platform in a seamless workflow.
Not only must the creation of a common platform for urban management mean the end of a siloed way of working, it should also represent the beginning of a true collaboration between the administration, as the legitimate owner and manager of the platform, and third parties. This implies a deep change in the role of the municipality, traditionally the only legitimate entity with the right of managing public services and public data. Opening the possibility of collaborating with other entities means recognising their potential as providers of public services or services of public interest.
Terry Kirby, in a recent article in The Guardian, believes imaginative alliances between public and private sector are essential for the future of the city. Such alliances ensure the continuity of public seamless services by improving resource availability and allowing for greater risk-sharing.
As José Manuel Hernández comments in this interesting (Spanish) article on the Telefonica Foundation website, common infrastructures like unique urban data collection platforms must be planned as a public good that needs to be open for third parties, scalable and multiservice.
“If infrastructures are planned from the beginning in a flexible way, they will be used in the future to provide advanced services that were probably not even imagined during its deployment phase,” says Hernández (free translation).
“It will also provide economic viability for solutions focused on reduced collectivities, allowing the entrance of new service providers, therefore contributing to achieve a return on infrastructure costs and to guarantee sustainability.”
Is this common city-platform feasible in the short-term? From a technology perspective we are still at the start of a journey towards a platform that seamlessly connects the physical and the virtual world by aggregating all our urban data. Meanwhile, we can imagine what the future could look like taking a look at this great video from MIT’s Senseable City Lab:
