Citizen-Centric Data Services for Smarter Cities

Smart Cities use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to manage more efficiently the resources and services offered by a city and to make them more approachable to all its stakeholders (citizens, companies and public administration). In contrast to the view of big corporations promoting holistic “smart city in a box” solutions, this work proposes that smarter cities can be achieved by combining already available infrastructure, i.e., Open Government Data and sensor networks deployed in cities, with the citizens’ active contributions towards city knowledge by means of their smartphones and the apps executed in them. In addition, this work introduces the main characteristics of the IES Cities platform, whose goal is to ease the generation of citizen-centric apps that exploit urban data in different domains. The proposed vision is achieved by providing a common access mechanism to the heterogeneous data sources offered by the city, which reduces the complexity of accessing the city’s data whilst bringing citizens closely to a prosumer (double consumer and producer) role and allowing to integrate legacy data into the cities’ data ecosystem.The European Union’s Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme has supported this work under grant agreement No. 325097

SmartSantander: Internet of Things research and innovation through citizen participation

The Smart City concept relates to improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities. However, it is important to highlight that, in order to effectively progress towards such smart urban environments, the people living in these cities must be tightly engaged in this endeavour. This paper presents two novel services that have been implemented in order to bring the Smart City closer to the citizen. The Participatory Sensing service we are proposing exploits the advanced features of smartphones to make the user part of the ubiquitous sensing infrastructure over which the Smart City concept is built. The Augmented Reality service is connected to the smart city platform in order to create an advanced visualization tool where the plethora of available information is presented to citizens embedded in their natural surroundings. A brief description of the smart city platform on top of which these services are built is also presented.Although only a few names appear in this paper’s list of authors, this work would not have been possible without the contribution and encouragement of the enthusiastic team of the SmartSantander project which has been partially funded by the European Commission under the contract number FP7-ICT-257992

The Utility's Transformation to a Smart City Platform Provider

The concept of Smart Cities is pervasive when contemplating emerging energy trends and opportunities. And increasingly, large cities and municipalities are moving forward with sustainability objectives which are decidedly concentrated on the premise of smart livability, workability, and environmental stewardship. Given this trend, coupled with an increasing percentage of the global population choosing to live in cities, Smart City methodologies offer plans and best practices to scale intelligently. To that end, The United Nations projects that by 2030, one in every three people will live in cities with at least half a million inhabitants. With this accelerated pace toward urbanization, infrastructure will need to be addressed. In considering today’s infrastructure needs, over 2.5 billion people in the developing world lack access to reliable electricity, approximately 2.5 billion people globally lack access to basic sanitation, almost 800 million people globally lack access to water, and 1-1.5 billion people globally do not have access to reliable phone services. Urbanization combined with massive needed infrastructure upgrades lends itself well to comprehensive Smart City approaches in cities around the world. One significant and influential common public good in cities today is the electric utility. While Smart City ideas are being rolled out and discussed at every level, most utilities are strategizing on how to enable Smart Community development. The research provided in this report demonstrates how utilities are uniquely positioned to be a Smart City Platform Provider in their respective communities. Utilities understand their communities, possess core capabilities, are often price regulated, and are incumbent asset operators and owners. This Capstone will impart that when utilities are empowered to become platform providers, they are best positioned to take leadership roles in Smart Community development. The research concludes that the electric utility must pivot and self-disrupt to take advantage of this very present opportunity. Failure to do so could result in the eventual utility death spiral. The recommendations center on the utility becoming a smart city enabler and champion. Utilities accomplish this by: - partnering with their stakeholders to understand a common vision; - leveraging their assets and data to unleash new products and services; - becoming customer-centric and embracing the rise of prosumers, and; - transforming into integrated platform providers. The research further demonstrates that the democratization of energy is critical to scaling smart city initiatives, and to do that responsibly, utilities must recognize and be willing to address climate change and sustainability priorities. The utility proposals on where to engage are fully discussed in the Utility Course of Action + Recommendations section of this report

Integrated system architecture for decision-making and urban planning in smart cities

Research and development of applications for smart cities are extremely relevant considering the various problems that population growth will bring to large urban centers in the next few years. Although research on cyber-physical systems, cloud computing, embedded devices, sensor and actuator networks, and participatory sensing, among other paradigms, is driving the growth of solutions, there are a lot of challenges that need to be addressed. Based on these observations, in this work, we present an integrated system architecture for decision-making support and urban planning by introducing its building blocks (termed components): sensing/actuation, local processing, communication, cloud platform, and application components. In the sensing/actuation component, we present the major relevant resources for data collection, identification devices, and actuators that can be used in smart city solutions. Sensing/actuation component is followed by the local processing component, which is responsible for processing, decision-making support, and control in local scale. The communication component, as the connection element among all these components, is presented with an emphasis on the open-access metropolitan area network and cellular networks. The cloud platform is the essential component for urban planning and integration with electronic governance legacy systems, and finally, the application component, in which the government administrator and users have access to public management tools, citizen services, and other urban planning resources15

Iot-enabled smart cities: evolution and outlook

For the last decade the Smart City concept has been under development, fostered by the growing urbanization of the world’s population and the need to handle the challenges that such a scenario raises. During this time many Smart City projects have been executed–some as proof-of-concept, but a growing number resulting in permanent, production-level deployments, improving the operation of the city and the quality of life of its citizens. Thus, Smart Cities are still a highly relevant paradigm which needs further development before it reaches its full potential and provides robust and resilient solutions. In this paper, the focus is set on the Internet of Things (IoT) as an enabling technology for the Smart City. In this sense, the paper reviews the current landscape of IoT-enabled Smart Cities, surveying relevant experiences and city initiatives that have embedded IoT within their city services and how they have generated an impact. The paper discusses the key technologies that have been developed and how they are contributing to the realization of the Smart City. Moreover, it presents some challenges that remain open ahead of us and which are the initiatives and technologies that are under development to tackle them.This research was partially funded by Spain State Research Agency (AEI) by means of the project FIERCE: Future Internet Enabled Resilient CitiEs (RTI2018-093475-A-I00). Prof. Song was supported by Smart City R&D project of the Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement (KAIA) grant funded by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT), Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) (Grant 18NSPS-B149386-01)

Sustainability’s Coming Home: Preliminary Design Principles for the Sustainable Smart District

Consumer trends like local consumption, sharing of property, and environmental awareness change our habits and thereby our surroundings. These trends have their origin in our direct environment, in the districts of our city or community, where we live and socialize. Cities and districts are changing to “smart cities” and “smart districts” as a part of the ongoing digitalization. These changes offer the possibility to entrench the idea of sustainability and build a platform-based ecosystem for a sustainable smart district. This research aims to identify guidelines in form of preliminary design principles for sustainable smart districts. To achieve this, we conduct a structured literature review. On this basis, we derive and develop preliminary design principles with the help of semistructured interviews and a non-representative sample of the German population. The resulting nine preliminary design principles describe a first insight into the design of sustainable smart districts

Using citizen science to complement IoT data collection: A survey of motivational and engagement factors in technology-centric citizen science projects

A key aspect of the development of Smart Cities involves the efficient and effective management of resources to improve liveability. Achieving this requires large volumes of sensors strategically deployed across urban areas. In many cases, however, it is not feasible to install devices in remote and inaccessible areas, resulting in incomplete data coverage. In such situations, citizens can often play a crucial role in filling this data collection gap. A popular complimentary science to traditional sensor-based data collection is to design Citizen Science (CS) activities in collaboration with citizens and local communities. Such activities are also designed with a feedback loop where the Citizens benefit from their participation by gaining a greater sense of awareness of their local issues while also influencing how the activities can align best with their local contexts. The participation and engagement of citizens are vital and yet often a real challenge in ensuring the long-term continuity of CS projects. In this paper, we explore engagement factors, factors that help keeping engagement high, in technology-centric CS projects where technology is a key enabler to support CS activities. We outline a literature review of exploring and understanding various motivational and engagement factors that influence the participation of citizens in technology-driven CS activities. Based on this literature, we present a mobile-based flood monitoring citizen science application aimed at supporting data collection activities in a real-world CS project as part of an EU project. We discuss the results of a user evaluation of this app, and finally discuss our findings within the context of citizens’ engagement

Systems approach to model smart tourism ecosystems

The tourism industry is inherently complex and a key player in sustainable development. This paper intends to discuss the path towards building a sustainable smart tourism ecosystem model by delving deep into the pivotal topics with interesting speculations on smart cities' perspectives that lay a broader foundation of smart tourism destinations. First, it discusses the interconnections and foundation of smart tourism ecosystems by proposing a general conceptual model describing traditional tourism transformation through ICTs. Second, by explicating each building block of smart tourism ecosystems and using systems methodology (systems thinking method and qualitative modeling in a frame of system dynamics) to break down the complex system of smart tourism's roles and components. Such methods are widely utilized in different fields of study to facilitate the decisionmaking process by furnishing a holistic view of the problem. For that matter, Causal Loop Diagramming (CLDs) was used as one of the powerful tools of systems thinking to depict smart tourism ecosystems. The proposed causal loop diagram considers sustainability as one of the main concerns and trying to shed some light on intricate networks of businesses, socioeconomic, and environmental subsystems in smart tourism destinations that are performing distinctively yet interdependent. This study is an ongoing process employing System Dynamics (SD) methodology for model testing and validation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Smart City Initiatives in South Africa and Paving a Way to Support Cities to Address Frontier Issues Using New and Emerging Technologies

Cite: Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) (2020) ‘The Smart City Initiatives in South Africa and Paving a Way to Support Cities to Address Frontier Issues Using New and Emerging Technologies’ doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/assaf.2019/0059This was the 3rd of three Innovation for Inclusive Development (IID) seminars hosted on 3 September 2019, St George’s Hotel, Pretoria by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) in partnership with the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and the South African Local Government Association (SALGA). The intent of the seminar was to solicit input from various stakeholders to define characteristics of a smart city in the South African context, how the concept aligns with the 2019 White Paper on Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) and where cities are in terms of their smart city strategies and/or projects. The outcome of the seminar brought a common understanding that the country needs a national framework on smart cities and that the framework should meet basic needs in a manner that advances inclusive economic growth in an environmentally sustainable manner. The following aspects were considered to achieve this: a clear definition of a smart city from a South African context, addressing all the existing challenges and not emulate first world smart city models; smart cities should link to the global market but provide solutions to local problems and not compete with first world countries; the national framework and policies for smart cities should clearly define roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders, be flexible and amendable in line with the 4IR; incorporate building blocks of smart cities, including: STEM education, citizen rights, enablers (such as power, water and internet connectivity), urban versus rural, shared goals and vision. The proceedings will form part of DSI’s ongoing consultations on the concept of smart cities.Department of Science and Innovation (DSI), South Africa