Last
2011 can be described as the year of the “Smart Cities” take off or,
as the colleague Pablo Sanchez Chillón would ironically
say: “the year that we lived smartly” (in Spanish). The excitement produced in cities all around the globe
about the adoption of these ultimate smart solutions for the binary
approach of success or failure of the XXIst century cities has attracted
an heterogeneous group of private stakeholders that do not want to miss
under any circumstance the business opportunity of the decade.
Of course, this Smart Cities discourse has been accompanied by several different size ad-hoc events in which these private stakeholders have fought to become privileged prescribers of Smart City solutions in the shape of gold sponsors. One example could be the Smart Citiy Expo & World Congress in Barcelona whose second edition is talking place in November 13-15 (the first edition last year attracted more than 6000 attendees proving the high interest around the topic). Another example could the past Smart Cities Industry Summit in London in September 25-26 or the next to come Smart City Exhibition in Bologna in October 29-31.
All these events are thought to be the playground in which the interested parties around the Smart Cities movement meet to discuss around the topic, show solutions and, step by step, improve life in the city hand in hand with technology. However, very often those interested parties are a complicated biased mixture between private stakeholders promoting their solutions, academic researchers offering an elevated discourse too often far away from real needs and city managers searching for advice.
Having the opportunity of attending and participating in some of them, what shocked me the most was the disconnection of the business actors participating in them and the reality under which most citizens like me live daily. Undoubtedly, as we have already commented in this blog, the success of the Smart City will only take place considering civic engagement as the center of any action.
It seems like the Smart City movement has been divided into two separate layers, intimately connected but one living ignoring the other. On the upper side we have the business Smart City movement, showing impressive technology-enhanced beautifully-designed city managers-oriented business solutions. On lower side we have the Smart Citizens underground movement, as I like to call it, where active citizens, citizeneers, have directly started taking over their public space with tailored solutions designed and tested by them to tackle their needs.
Fascinatingly, not only technology applied to urban solutions has provided new business space for big tech companies but it also has empowered citizens to be able to act and interconnect with the public space independently of their closest government bodies.
So, what happens when a group of citizens wants to have access to data about their surroundings in the city, like acoustic contamination, daylight or sound? What if they can’t access this kind of data in their city or it is directly not being collected by their city? Well, they can do like the promoters of the “Smart Citizen - sensores ciudadanos” project:
The idea is to construct an open source Arduino-based collection platform that is feed with the data coming from tons of sensor boards that capture environment data and send it over the Internet to the platform. The promoters shared their idea in the crowdfunding platform Goteo and reached enough investment to carry on with their project. The boards will be placed at the homes of donors, like me. So any person can be user and producer of data for the common good. Of course I am longing to receive mine at home soon and start posting about my experience.
Of course, this Smart Cities discourse has been accompanied by several different size ad-hoc events in which these private stakeholders have fought to become privileged prescribers of Smart City solutions in the shape of gold sponsors. One example could be the Smart Citiy Expo & World Congress in Barcelona whose second edition is talking place in November 13-15 (the first edition last year attracted more than 6000 attendees proving the high interest around the topic). Another example could the past Smart Cities Industry Summit in London in September 25-26 or the next to come Smart City Exhibition in Bologna in October 29-31.
All these events are thought to be the playground in which the interested parties around the Smart Cities movement meet to discuss around the topic, show solutions and, step by step, improve life in the city hand in hand with technology. However, very often those interested parties are a complicated biased mixture between private stakeholders promoting their solutions, academic researchers offering an elevated discourse too often far away from real needs and city managers searching for advice.
Having the opportunity of attending and participating in some of them, what shocked me the most was the disconnection of the business actors participating in them and the reality under which most citizens like me live daily. Undoubtedly, as we have already commented in this blog, the success of the Smart City will only take place considering civic engagement as the center of any action.
It seems like the Smart City movement has been divided into two separate layers, intimately connected but one living ignoring the other. On the upper side we have the business Smart City movement, showing impressive technology-enhanced beautifully-designed city managers-oriented business solutions. On lower side we have the Smart Citizens underground movement, as I like to call it, where active citizens, citizeneers, have directly started taking over their public space with tailored solutions designed and tested by them to tackle their needs.
Fascinatingly, not only technology applied to urban solutions has provided new business space for big tech companies but it also has empowered citizens to be able to act and interconnect with the public space independently of their closest government bodies.
So, what happens when a group of citizens wants to have access to data about their surroundings in the city, like acoustic contamination, daylight or sound? What if they can’t access this kind of data in their city or it is directly not being collected by their city? Well, they can do like the promoters of the “Smart Citizen - sensores ciudadanos” project:
The idea is to construct an open source Arduino-based collection platform that is feed with the data coming from tons of sensor boards that capture environment data and send it over the Internet to the platform. The promoters shared their idea in the crowdfunding platform Goteo and reached enough investment to carry on with their project. The boards will be placed at the homes of donors, like me. So any person can be user and producer of data for the common good. Of course I am longing to receive mine at home soon and start posting about my experience.
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