Smart city H2020 on going projects: An overview
Monday, 2nd of June of 2018
As a process of technological surveillance, the CitiSim consortium regularly analyses other approaches to smart city concept, in this entry blog we are going to provide an overview of the H2020 ongoing project. The H2020 research program has been funding research projects related with smart city since the concept inception, in this entry we will see some of the most relevant projects currently being carried out under this program.
One of the recurring problems in this area is the definition of a smart city and how we can assess how ‘intelligent’ a city is. The CITIKEYs project has developed and validated a set of indicators or KPIs and a set of data collection procedures for smart cities and related projects. KPIs are grouped into people, planet, prosperity, governance and spread with a total of 92 project indicators and 73 city indicators. Project indicators serve cities to assess the impact of a single project before and after the project is deployed, while city indicators serve to identify areas for overall improvement in a city. In our view, the simple establishment of mechanisms to assess and measure the status of these indicators is already a very important step in raising a city’s awareness of its current status.
CPaaS.io is a project for the creation of a technological platform for cities. The platform includes a structure for the inclusion of the internet of things and analysis of the information generated in the city. This platform would be outsourced to a cloud environment in order to facilitate the management of open data by city governments. A similar approach follows the SELECT for Cities project but is aimed at the co-creation of applications by the different stakeholders in an urban environment (citizens, businesses and governments). Currently the platform is being designed and little information is available about its features.
The Sharing Cities project works both locally and globally, its vision is to support citizen participation in the creation of intelligent solutions for the city. It seeks to identify ideas that are easily scalable from design/development to neighbourhood level so that they can be taken to city, national, European and international levels through collaboration. Collaboration and open data, the Welive project is developing a technological platform that involves citizens, public administration and local businesses in the innovation process. The idea is similar to citizen hackathon events where citizens and companies come together to develop applications collaboratively in a short/intensive period of time, usually a weekend. In Welive, the public administration is also involved in this process.
Seeking the commitment of citizens, the Human City Platform project has created a virtual currency (social currency) to reward those citizens most committed to civic behaviour (for example, through monitoring social networks) and identify the problems of the city. It seems that focusing the designs on what the citizen demands and how to increase their commitment and involve them in this process is one of the main objectives of many projects. The Open4citizens project uses hackathons to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing among citizens. To this end, it develops strategies and tools to support such collaboration and promote the co-creation of new services.
A similar approach follows the Socratic project that aims to create a platform to involve citizens and companies in a continuous innovation process incorporating gamification techniques so that this commitment lasts over time.
Once the FIWARE or SOFIA2 type platforms were developed, which also emerged from European research projects, the involvement of citizens is now sought, mainly with a view to defining applications and solutions that provide added value to cities.
The links to the projects:
Author: Felix Villanueva
Company: UCLM (Abalia)