"The city-platform: seamless services for Smart Cities", in Smart Cities Global Blog

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:

Investing in a Smart City, where to start?

As suggested in the entry “The paradise of the Smart Cities”, the adoption of a strategy to become an intelligent city is very promising to promote cities in the global competing world. The label of a Smart City would surely help positioning the city at international level and thus attracting talent and investment. Recognising this, municipalities all around the globe have started allocating considerable amounts of budget to conceptualise a Smart City strategy for their cities and start developing immediately the projects that will make their cities stand out from the rest. In this sphere, with the money and the political commitment assured, local decision-makers face the following question, where do I start? Answering this question implies a deep knowledge of what is the future scenario that the city wants to attain, in other words, it implies having a clear view of what a Smart City should be.

But, what is a Smart City? The label of the Smart City is still a blurry concept. Some definitions are as  old as one decade. In 2000 the paper “The Vision of a Smart City”[1] expounded that the vision of “smart cities” is the urban centre of the future, made safe, secure environmentally green, and efficient because all structures – whether for power, water, transportation, etc. – are designed, constructed and maintained making use of advanced, integrated materials, sensors, electronics, and networks which are interfaced with computerized systems comprised of databases, tracking, and decision-making algorithms".

More recently, the working paper “Smart Cities in Europe”[2] offers another approximation to the idea explaining that any city can be defined as “smart” when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance”. This definition is also presented in the Wikipedia and you might recall it from many other posts.

What about the fields of action? It seems quite accepted that the main traditional components of a Smart City are (Wikipedia): 

• Smart Economy 
• Smart Mobility 
• Smart Environment 
• Smart Governance 
• Smart Living
• Smart People 

However, the components of a Smart City are as open as its own definition. It is the city’s own priorities who decide which should be the field of action to start with. And there is no mandatory requirement that says that an intelligent city must develop actions in each of the mentioned fields. The important thing is not to take them just as words put together but thinking what might be inside. For instance, what is the meaning of Smart People and how does it fit in a Smart City?

A Smart City project should be much more than just a project using IT. Technology should serve to urbanise, should be born from a urban need and not otherwise. Moreover, it should include their end-users in the whole creation process, from the first steps towards the concretion of the urban problem till the piloting testing phase, to assure their ultimate successful adoption. This is the place for the Smart People!

Going back to the title of this entry “Investing in a Smart City, where to start?”, city decision-makers with economical possibilities to run Smart City projects might well be receiving tons of invitations by private stakeholders with a folder under their arms containing the ultimate Smart City solutions. These last would be extremely happy to have the opportunity of showing which are the steps to take and where to invest the money. City leaders should be aware that it is the citizen’s worries and concerns who should guide and legitimate the investment process. Smart people should have a voice to decide which is the path that OUR cities should follow to become smart. As recognised by Rob Goodspeed in this post: “Only a democratically legitimate government can determine whether money is well spent on a food or crime tracking systems, versus other pressing concerns like education, health care, and infrastructure”. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that it is us, the citizeneers, who ultimately decide and legitimate governments.

“I have a queue of enterprises in front of my office waiting to sell their Smart City solutions. I argue them that it is me who has to tell them what do we want and not the other way”. I heard these words last Friday. They were pronounced by one top political leader of Barcelona. I just hope that the “it is me” also means “it is me and all the citizens who have chosen me to represent them who will tell what to do”. This is the path to follow. And I am happy to be able to see this project closely.

Where to start a Smart City project? Taking Smart People on board first.

[1] “The Vision of a Smart City”, Robert E. Hall (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA), 2nd International Life Extension Technology Workshop, Paris, 28th September 2000

[2] "Smart cities in Europe", Andrea Caragliu (Politecnico di Milano), Chiara del Bo (Università degli Studi di Milano) and Peter Nijkamp (VU University), Research Memorandum 2009-48

Photo by CubaGallery (Flickr)

Citizeneers: the city enablers

These last decades, the economic globalization process (which has tried hard to homogenise all of us and that has installed McDonald’s and Starbucks Coffee in every self-respecting city) have led cities to face new consuming global problems, problems that have been often fought with local solutions surpassing the city’s self-reaction power. As Zygmunt Bauman radically recognized in his book Liquid Times. Living in an age of uncertainty (2007), cities nowadays have become the rubbish dumps for the problems produced at global level. 


Our local urban environments are facing tremendous global concerns such as climate change, budget cuts, population raises and, specially, social discontentment and rupture. Cities have grown spectacularly these last decades mainly because of the arrival of populated waves of immigration. As a consequence, specially in North America and I am seeing this also in Europe, ethnic residential areas have appeared shaping “one-colour” isolated communities. By this impulse of belonging to a similar-minded community, citizens have kept away from the interaction with other realities and, consequently, from direct action.


In this context, the need has become urgent for cities to shift from fragmented barren places to alive spaces that ensure and smoother social cohesion and inclusion. Cities’ leaders, sometimes with limited space of action and lack of resources, have found themselves not enough prepared to allow this change. However, the advance and new possibilities of ICT has revolutionized urban development and has opened new easier channels to enable citizens action in this field. What is the new role for citizens then?


In her great article “The Enabling City”, appeared in the Summer 2011 Issue of Next American City, Chiara Camponeschi recognised the huge importance of political involvement in this radical empowerment change. According to her words decision-makers should commit for: “driving  long-term structural changes by unlocking the capacity of others to meaningfully participate in the life of a user-produced city”. That implies “a shift from control to enablement”.


Moreover, there will be no user-produced city without empowered citizens: citizeneers. As Saskia Sassen explained in this great speech at Lift “The Future of the Smart Cities” (every minute is worth seeing): “the logic of citizens is not the logic of managers”. This means that, to allow future success in urban decisions, citizeneers should be placed at the centre of any action, giving them the tools to be aware of the community’s concerns and the spaces, virtual or not, where to interact with other citizeneers. And government should carefully watch this process. I would like to stress here the watch, implying no action: the power and the action should be given to citizeneers. Using a gardening parallelism, the seed of self-action should be sowed in a fertilised land, left alone and harvested for processing once the plant has grown.


These innovative ways of social cooperation for an inclusive sustainability in cities are not new. Spaces like living labs (which deserve more than one blog’s entry) have been doing for years a great job providing meeting points for citizeneers from different communities and levels of knowledge, ready for interaction and ideas sharing. The first citizeneers have also pioneered in creating their own solutions for non-existing services. The fruit of cooperation for solving the community’s concerns has started to grow: some self-development projects are already here. Just to name some, the reporting tools Fix My Street from UK and Repara Ciudad (in Spanish, according to the website an English version is coming soon) from Spain or the car sharing French initiative BuzzCar (in French).

Image: think4photop / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It's raining conferences!

Following my last article on the interest of a variety of stakeholders in this new concept of Smart Cities, it seems that this Autumn 2011 comes full of interesting events around the issue for them. As far as I know, there are 5 global conferences approaching, 3 of them in Europe, 1 in America and 1 in Asia:

Intelligent Cities Expo 2011, Hamburg, Nov 8 - 10

The 2011 edition of the Intelligent Cities Expo is taking place in Hamburg. As usual, the event will have a conference and an exposition section where stakeholders will discuss around solutions for sustainable cities.

The chosen topics for the conference include the core elements identified as essential for building smart, sustainable global cities: Smart Energy, Intelligent Water & Waste, Intelligent Mobility, Intelligent Security and Intelligent ICT.

The conference fee for 3 days is $1395.

You can follow the Intelligent Cities Expo 2011 Twitter account.

Changes in the conferences dates!

Smart Cities Global, Washington DC Nov 8 - 9 March 20 - 21, Kuala Lumpur Nov 15 - 16 March 27 - 28, Amsterdam Nov 29 - 30  Feb 1 - 2

These series of conferences will be happening during the month of November in three separate coins of the world, three areas know to be hot spots for Smart City development: South-east Asia + Australia, Europe and America.

The conference topics include Smart solutions for: Energy, Transportation, ICT, Water and Sustainability. Besides, the main page of Smart Cities Global has an interesting blog around the issues that will be treated during the conferences.

One of the top thinkers in Smart City solutions Carlo Ratti director of SENSEable City Lab will be speaking at the three events.

The conference fees are: Washington DC USD1500, Kuala Lumpur AUD1500 + GST, Amsterdam GBP950 + VAT.

You can follow the Smart Cities Global conferences’ Twitter account.

Smart City Expo, Barcelona, Spain, Nov 29 - Dec 2

This event is going to take place Barcelona and I am so excited about this happening in my city.

It is the first edition of a world event aimed at staying for long in the scene of Smart City conferences. The event will have two sections: the conference itself and an exposition of Smart City solutions. Its main inspiration theme will be “Smart society for innovative and sustainable cities”.

The list of confirmed speakers so far has an outstandingly good level providing an excellent balance of visions ranging from top private companies like IBM, Cisco, Telefonica I+D or Accenture to top research institutions and universities like MIT, IESE or LSE. Maybe what is left from my point of view here is the academic vision of those caring about the social aspects of Smart City solutions in cities and the vision of the Citizeneers as end-users.

What excites me is that it includes various of the thinkers I have been following for long:

- Anthony Townsend from the Institute for the Future.

- Adam Greenfield from Urbanscale.

- Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Lab from MIT (who is participating in 3 out of the 5 conferences here. He is not human, he is u-man)

- Carlos Leite, lecturer and expert professor on sustainable cities and architecture.

- John F. Moore from Gov in the Lab.

The conference fee is not published yet.

You can follow the Smart City Expo Twitter account.

The paradise of the Smart Cities

The use of the word Smart Cities has become extremely popular over the last years in the agenda of many decision makers in all society sectors. The fascination for this term has motivated the production of many literature in this area. The Smart Cities term is relatively new although the idea of using technology to modernise the city is not. Popular terms in the past included Intelligent Cities, U-Cities, Cities 2.0 or Digital Cities, the past two having fell slightly into disuse. Here follows a comparative graph of the three most used terms these last years using Google Trends today:

It might be because of this rapid popularity and a variety of interpretations that there is not a clear definition of what a Smart City is. Despite of this, the Smart city revolution represents a unique opportunity for many. For IT stakeholders (that is the case of IBM or Cisco to name some), the “Smart City” labelling has become a fantastic marketing strategy to push the market for their solutions and products for cities and urban areas. For city managers, this term seems to be the ultimate help with which to compete in the global innovation run towards worldwide recognition.

In the framework of a financial crisis whose end we are still unable to foresee and the public incomes decreasing dramatically, cities are starting to compete in the global world regardless of their nation-states with the aim of attracting talent, investment, entrepreneurs or big multinationals landing in the renewed cities and, ultimately, to promote new opportunities for local companies and entrepreneurs. In this context, the Smart City run represent a great chance to (re)urbanise cities with the help of innovative solutions based on an intensive use of new technologies.

Thinking in this, many cities worldwide have been tempted to start defining and implementing their own Smart City plans. However, is there a common model for them to follow? Regarding the help of IT providers, can all private solutions be tailored to fit every city's unique casuistry?

The first attempts to implement Smart City strategies have proved that, even with close cities, there is no common Smart City model and every city has adapted it to their own constraints. In Europe, for instance, we can find the examples of Malaga focusing on creating infrastructure of sensors for the city whereas cities like Amsterdam are opting to implement a wide variety of actions from opening public data to energy efficiency actions. Outside European borders, cities like Kochi have started building new business districts equipped with the latest technological solutions and some cities like Masdar have started construction from scratch. It seems that there are as many Smart City models as cities willing to become one and common assets are still unclear.

The future of the Smart Cities is, however, promising. Despite the initial conceptual disparities, Smart Cities seem to be a unique ecosystem that brings together traditionally opposite stakeholders that work together for the benefit of urban areas. These stakeholders are:

- local public entities - municipalities and councils that need to have a clear view on their needs and constraints to be able to manage the Smart City change, providers of user-driven scenarios

- private sector - SMEs, entrepreneurs, big companies that have seen an enormous potential market in this new ecosystem

- university & research centres & living labs - facilirators of co-creation models

- end users - citizens / citizeneers, companies...the key piece in this puzzle

This scenario is exciting and the changes to come will surely be worth witnessing. Hopefully we will be able to do so in this blog!

Citizeneer?

Citizeneer is a word of my own created out of the words citizen + engineer. Citizeneers would be the people living in the core of cities, using new technologies and information to interact ubiquitously between them and the city and, with their actions and traces, shaping the decisions on the future of the city.

I had the extreme luck of being born with a computer under the arms (IBM 286, wonderful times!) and that discovered the Internet when being a teenager. Now, I am standing flabbergasted watching how advances in technologies help creating alive urban spaces, putting citizens back at the centre of cities, empowering them to let them actively participate in the era of the intelligent cities. And this amazes me.

In this blog I would like to write about the interaction of cities and new technologies: the so-called models and projects of intelligent cities, smart cities, open data, the Internet of Things, citizen participation, services co-creation, living labs... The list of topics will be, as blogs are, completely dynamic. And on the top of it all, I would like to talk about the social implications of the introduction of new technologies in people’s life and how they can impact them. I hope you find it useful!

It has taken me a long time to decide to start this blog. Before, I have been following for years very interesting long-lasting blogs written by visionary people with strong solid opinions on the topics of my interest. My objective is not to write one of those blogs but simply create a space to share my views with others, to allow discussion and hear from others‘ own experiences.

I decided to write this blog in English precisely to reach a wider group of people (so please natives, if you find any error -there will be plenty of them-, correct me!). I am truly convinced of the power of globalizing (certain) discussions, such as those around cities evolution. As prestigious sociologist Saskia Sassen explained, global cities around the world are creating unique own spaces, linked one to the other, surpassing the limits of nation-states with the advance of technology.