Municipal Resource Guide to Leading Practices in Cost Savings

Ontario municipalities of all sizes face pressure to “do more with less.” Commissioned by the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs, this Resource Guide provides municipal officials with single-source information about a range of current leading practices in cost savings in small and mid-sized Ontario municipalities. Municipalities across the province are continually developing innovative practices that save costs without incurring service level reductions. Most of these practices involve small-scale initiatives that result in modest savings. Yet even modest savings add up over time, and multiple small initiatives in a single municipality can make a big difference. In addition, by providing an opportunity to re-think established service provision practices, these initiatives often have significant non-monetary benefits as well. This Guide, based on a year of research by a team at Western University, presents detailed profiles of 14 selected cases of leading practices in cost savings. The case studies come from municipalities of varying sizes in all regions of the province, and profile leading practices in a wide variety of service fields. In addition to these cases, the Guide presents a reference compendium of 159 cost-savings recommendations from recent Municipal Service Delivery Reviews. The Guide is intended to serve as a source of ideas and inspiration for Ontario’s local officials as they seek to provide the best possible services to their residents in challenging fiscal times.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/urbancentre-reports/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Critical Role of Public Charging Infrastructure

Editors: Peter Fox-Penner, PhD, Z. Justin Ren, PhD, David O. JermainA decade after the launch of the contemporary global electric vehicle (EV) market, most cities face a major challenge preparing for rising EV demand. Some cities, and the leaders who shape them, are meeting and even leading demand for EV infrastructure. This book aggregates deep, groundbreaking research in the areas of urban EV deployment for city managers, private developers, urban planners, and utilities who want to understand and lead change

Sharing Cities: from vision to reality. A people, place and platform approach to implement Milan's Smart City strategy

Transforming Milan in a smart city is a strategic objective and political priority of the Municipality, which has taken up a variety of projects and experiments with the aim to transform the main suburbs of the city in smart areas. This paper presents Milan’s demonstration of a smart district allowed by the EU funded project “Sharing Cities”, aimed at creating a "smart" district with "near-zero" emissions in three different “lighthouse” cities, London, Lisbon, and Milan. The paper describes the first outcomes of such project in Milan, obtained through a variety of tools and actions based on a People, place and platform approach, aimed at involving the different stakeholders and applying solutions to foster innovation processes instrumental to the implementation of a smart city urban agenda

Knowledge Requirements, Gaps and Learning Responses in Smart Grid Adoption: An Exploratory Study in U.S. Electric Utility Industry

The U.S. electric utility industry is facing a number of challenges today, including aging infrastructure, growing customer demand, CO2 emissions, and increased vulnerability to overloads and outages. Utilities are under greater regulatory, societal and consumer pressure to provide a more reliable and efficient power supply and reduce its carbon footprint. In response, utilities are investing in smart grid technologies. Despite various definitions of smart grid, it is characterized by employing a set of sophisticated sensing, processing and communicating digital technologies to enable a more observable, controllable, and automated power supply. Yet, the adoption of smart grid technologies presents significant knowledge challenges to electric utilities. This study aims to advance the understanding of IT knowledge challenges in smart grid adoption by focusing on three research questions: 1) What knowledge requirements are critical for smart grid adoption? 2) What knowledge gaps are utilities facing with smart grid adoption? How do utilities vary in the level of knowledge gaps? 3) How do utilities overcome knowledge gaps through learning? How do utilities vary in the learning choices? This study adopts a qualitative approach using data from 20 utility interviews and secondary information to address the above questions. The analysis indicates four broad areas of knowledge requirements, which are smart grid technology and vendor selection, smart grid deployment and integration, big data, and customer management. The data also reveals several knowledge gaps faced by utilities in these four areas, and confirms that utilities vary in the level of knowledge gaps, which depends on a mix of factors including prior experience, IT sophistication, service territory characteristics, size, ownership form, regulatory support and support from external organizations. The data further indicates several learning practices that are commonly adopted by utilities to overcome the knowledge gaps in smart grid adoption. It is also determined that utilities vary in the configuration of these practices, and the scale and format of many practices. The variance in learning responses is jointly determined by level of knowledge gaps, knowledge relatedness, size, risk-averse culture and top management support. This study has both research and practical implications. Theoretically, it enriches IT adoption, broader IS research and organizational learning literature in several ways. From the practical perspective, it also has valuable implications for utilities, regulators and other regulated industries and economies

Popping into Focus: Community Engagement for Environmental Impact and Awareness

Grey literature from Microsoft-funded Urban Futures Summer Workshop 2020 Community Engagement Group https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2020/10/Community-Engagement.pdfIn this white paper, we develop a dedicated space (physical and virtual) for the early and ongoing incorporation of community engagement through a series of scalable pop-ups and an open data platform to complement local sensor deployments. One cannot solve wicked problems in white papers. Instead, we are proposing a prototype that will grow and change over time. By incorporating on-the-ground practice and experimentation in collaboration with local partners and governments, we hope that our solution will promote the rights of residents to shape how and where new technologies are deployed within their cities, and how the data from those technologies are used.MicrosoftOffice of the VP for Researc

Data Governance and Sovereignty in Urban Data Spaces Based on Standardized ICT Reference Architectures

European cities and communities (and beyond) require a structured overview and a set of tools as to achieve a sustainable transformation towards smarter cities/municipalities, thereby leveraging on the enormous potential of the emerging data driven economy. This paper presents the results of a recent study that was conducted with a number of German municipalities/cities. Based on the obtained and briefly presented recommendations emerging from the study, the authors propose the concept of an Urban Data Space (UDS), which facilitates an eco-system for data exchange and added value creation thereby utilizing the various types of data within a smart city/municipality. Looking at an Urban Data Space from within a German context and considering the current situation and developments in German municipalities, this paper proposes a reasonable classification of urban data that allows the relation of various data types to legal aspects, and to conduct solid considerations regarding technical implementation designs and decisions. Furthermore, the Urban Data Space is described/analyzed in detail, and relevant stakeholders are identified, as well as corresponding technical artifacts are introduced. The authors propose to setup Urban Data Spaces based on emerging standards from the area of ICT reference architectures for Smart Cities, such as DIN SPEC 91357 “Open Urban Platform” and EIP SCC. In the course of this, the paper walks the reader through the construction of a UDS based on the above-mentioned architectures and outlines all the goals, recommendations and potentials, which an Urban Data Space can reveal to a municipality/city. Finally, we aim at deriving the proposed concepts in a way that they have the potential to be part of the required set of tools towards the sustainable transformation of German and European cities in the direction of smarter urban environments, based on utilizing the hidden potential of digitalization and efficient interoperable data exchange.EC/H2020/646578/EU/Triangulum: The Three Point Project / Demonstrate. Disseminate. Replicate./TriangulumBMBF, 13NKE012, Datenaustausch und Zusammenarbeit im urbanen Raum - Bestandsanalyse (Urban Data Space

Smart Cities and Positive Energy Districts: Urban Perspectives in 2020

Since their creation eight years ago, the EERA Joint Programmes and their participating institutions have accumulated important knowledge on specific topics of the programmes they carried out. This includes Smart Cities and Positive Energy Districts, which are not only crucial topics tackled by EERA Joint Programme in the Smart Cities Workplan, but also in H2020 as well as Horizon Europe or national calls, focusing on innovative solutions based on interdisciplinary approaches, which are needed to face the highly complex challenges in coming years, from sustainable urban development to emergencies in cities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The foreword of EERA JP in SC Special Issue 1|2018 highlighted the aim of the Special Issues series, which was, and still is, to support the growth of research networks in the EC framework. According to this, our ambition is to publish the most promising research and innovation projects which EERA JPonSC partners, and others, set up in the framework of H2020 Programme, to drive the attention to the fact that EERA JP on SC is one of the strong voices in research in Europe, capable of highlighting and integrating different solutions and points of view