Towards smart city democracy

In this article we discuss the current state of smart cities from a technological perspective. We argue that smart city developments are in a state of transition going from being technology focused to now putting emphasis on humans living in the cities. The transition is still latent in the smart city deployments, and we argue that quite a few existing, and new smart city deployments are still relying on the old technology-focused approach to smart cities. We elaborate our own experiences in this particular field, and provide two concrete cases on how we are approaching citizen empowered smart city technologies. Finally, we discuss how smart city technologies should respond to citizen needs

Advancing experimentation-as-a-service through urban IoT experiments

Smart cities are becoming a vibrant application domain for a number of science fields. As such, service providers and stakeholders are beginning to integrate co-creation aspects into current implementations to shape the future smart city solutions. In this context, holistic solutions are required to test such aspects in real city-scale Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, considering the complex city ecosystems. In this paper, we discuss OrganiCity's implementation of an experimentation-as-a-service (EaaS) framework, presenting a toolset that allows developing, deploying, and evaluating smart city solutions in a one-stop shop manner. This is the first time such an integrated toolset is offered in the context of a large-scale IoT infrastructure, which spans across multiple European cities. We discuss the design and implementation of the toolset, presenting our view on what EaaS should provide, and how it is implemented. We present initial feedback from 25 experimenter teams that have utilized this toolset in the OrganiCity project, along with a discussion on two detailed actual use cases to validate our approach. Learnings from all experiments are discussed as well as architectural considerations for platform scaling. Our feedback from experimenters indicates that EaaS is a viable and useful approach.The authors would like to thank the experimenter teams and volunteers who participated in OrganiCit