Green Digital Charter
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The prestigious World Smart City Awards are one of the key event of the annual international Smart City Expo World Congress taking place in Barcelona. The aim of these internationally-acclaimed awards is to recognize, promote and support pioneering city strategies, projects and ideas that can potentially change citizens’ lives through their outstanding innovation, impact and feasibility, as well as stimulating inclusive, equitable, safe, healthy and collaborative cities, thus enhancing quality of life for all.
Register now (and until 4 September) on www.smartcityexpo.com.
Who can participate?
Acteurs from both public and private sectors can apply for the World Smart City Awards, divided in three categories:
- The City Award for cities that demonstrate established strategies, initiatives and policies developed for its citizens
- The Project Award for implemented projects that are already benefitting inhabitants in a specific smart city area
- The Innovative Idea Award for innovative, bottom-up concepts that aim to achieve sustainable integrated development in cities and can demonstrate feasibility of implementation
Proposals should be related to one of the topics of the 2017 edition
8 themes for the 2017 edition
You have until 4 September to apply. Don’t miss the chance!
Winners will be announced at the World Smart City Awards on 15 November, in a ceremony that attracts an audience of more than 1,000 key public and private decision-makers, providing an excellent opportunity to gain prestige and visibility.
From 26th to 28th of September 2017, Stavenger will host Nordic Edge Expo, the largest smart city event in the Nordics. This international three-day conference will exhibit new technological solutions that will make cities and communities smarter and greener.
- Day 1: Edtech, community, DNB NXT & the Nordic model
- Day 2: Building the Smart City
- Day 3: Smart City Business Models
The main theme for this year is: Smart Happiness. Each year, the United Nates publish the World Happiness Report. For 2017, Nordic countries are ranked as follows: 1) Norway 2) Denmark 3) Iceland 4) Findland and 10) Sweden.
Other more traditional themes will be covered like: Mobility, Welfare Technology, EdTech, Energy & Environent, Big and Open Data, Business Models for the Public Sector, Smart Art, Efficiency and Improvement of Municipal Services, Citizen Involvement etc.
Full programme and registration at https://www.nordicedge.org/.
“Safaris”
Nordic Edge offers the opportunity to explore some great smart city-related projects in the region: the Lyse ‘smart-home‘ demo, the ‘Green Mountain’ data centre (a former NATO ammunition storage facility converted into a unique hgh-security collocation data centre) ; virtual reality at the Stavanger Art Museum ; the Ryfast tunnel (the world’s longest undersea road tunnel) and a test-lab where you can dive into the possible future city.
Places are limited. Register now at https://www.nordicedge.org/safaris-2017/.
On 21 September (an equinox day!), the EIP-SCC Action Cluster on Sustainable Districts and Built Environment is co-organising with the Tampere Smart City Program an exceptional field-visit of Tampere’s smart districts:
- The EU Gugle ‘deep-retrofitting’ project >> see Tampere’s profile at http://eu-gugle.eu/pilot-cities/tampere/
- The Vuores eco-efficient district, featuring nature-based solutions
- The Härmälänranta ‘near-zero energy’ district
Full agenda : TAMPERE EIP-SCC field visit invitation
Please note that travel and accommodation must be covered by participants.
Share your interest in participating to the field-visit ideally by 14 September at https://goo.gl/forms/Hf69hvSu05AOOZFz1
Register to MINDTREK, Tampere annual smart city event (20-21 September 2017)
Smart Tampere Program by the City of Tampere was launched at Mindtrek last year. At the same period last year (18 October), Anna-Kaisa Ikonen, mayor of Tampere, signed the Green Digital Charter at a ceremony organised alongside the EUROCITIES mobility and knowledge society forum meeting. [read more at http://bit.ly/2vLlvfV].
Consisting of workshops, inspiring speeches and lightning talks, the Smart City Event at Mindtrek focuses this year on themes such as Smart Mobility, Digital Learning, Smart Lighting and City of Things. Special emphasis is put on the citizen’s perspective.
Agenda and registration are available at http://www.mindtrek.org/2017/smart-city-event-tampere/. Benefit from early-bird tickets (-10%) until 20 August!
- More useful information about Tampere smart city at http://smarttampere.fi/news
- Tampere’s GDC profile : http://bit.ly/GDC-Tampere
Access Edinburgh’s city profile by clicking here.
As one of the world’s leading capital cities, ranked second for quality of life in 2017, Edinburgh is experimenting with a number of smart city approaches to improve city sustainability, while driving innovation.
Edinburgh is experimenting with smart waste sensors to better understand patterns of litter across the city. An initial project focused on on-street litter bins, and looked to improve the placement and number of bins, and improve routing efficiency. This would help reduce fuel consumption, as drivers stopped making unnecessary trips to bins that did not need emptying, as well as raising awareness of waste volumes produced in Edinburgh to provide useful data for strategic decision making about waste management in the city. Edinburgh is currently expanding this smart approach to investigate the potential benefits of upscaling to city scale, and potentially to other waste types.
Edinburgh is also currently investing in lighting upgrades, that will replace every lighting column in the city with an energy efficient LED over the next 3 years, as well as providing improvements such as controllable dimming. This infrastructure will also provide an Internet of Things network where additional devices such as traffic or air quality sensors to further improve the city’s data-led approach to sustainability and innovation.
On 30-31 May 2017, Edinburgh hosted the first GuiDanCe ‘workshadowing’ visit. Among other activities, participants from the cities of Oulu and Reykjavik discovered innovative projects developed by the University and Edinburgh Living Lab. Get more insights and pictures through our Storify! Click here.
The SCIS conference, untitled ‘Empowering solutions for better cities‘, will gather creative thinkers and decision-makers in the various fields of sustainable and smart urban planning. High-level city representatives will SCIS,
This conference seeks to encourage the replication of solutions, good practices and lessons learned among cities and businesses.
Have a look at the agenda and register at https://www.scisconference2017.eu/.
On 7 and 8 June 2017, Malaga will host the 8th ‘Green Cities’ Forum of Urban Intelligence and Sustainability ‘, a smart city trade-fair attended by more than 27 000 professionals between 2010 and 2016.
In this 8th edition, two main spaces will be allocated for round-tables and presentations:
- The “ICT & Sustainability Forum” space will stimulate an open debate on how the ICT industry contributes to optimal development of the information society in a sustainable world.
Round-tables and presentations will focus on Governance – Building – Digital Transformatin – Smart Cities – Energy – Finance – and Mobility.
- The “Green Lab” area will provide space for presenting commercial and institutional products and services
Participants registered in Green Cities’ Networking will have access to an online meeting tool allowing them to debate, cooperate, do commercial deals and raise initiatives and projects with cities, participantsd and exhibitors.
Municipal technicians of the main Spanish cities on sustainable development, energy efficiency and smart management will be present.
Have a look at the speakers here!
How to participate? Go to this page.
On Thursday 8 June 2014 (14:30 – 15:30 CET), the city of Copenhagen will present its innovation procurement procedure used to deploy an Intelligent Street Lighting system throughout the city.
REGISTER HERE
Copenhagen’s comprehensive carbon-reduction plan targets a 50% decrease of the energy consumption of its street lights. A 250 million Danish krones (about 33 million euro) contract was awarded for installing a new LED street lighting system and 12-year maintenance.
To finance the project, the tender used innovation procurement procedures to ensure appropriate products and systems being purchased. Louise Rathleff (Program Manager) and Stine Ellermann (Contract Manager) will give detailed description of the procurement procedure and share their knowledge and lessons learnt from the procurement.
Moderated by Anja De Cunto (EUROCITIES), this webinar is organised by the SPICE project, in cooperation with EUROCITIES and the EIP-SCC initiative.
For any enquiry, please contact y.li[a]mail.ertico.com
More information on www.spice-project.eu
On 7-8 June 2017, Bordeaux will host a workshop on ‘Making Smart Cities Sustainable, from large-scale pilots to real-life deployment‘.
REGISTER NOW
The event is organised by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) in partnership with Bordeaux Métropole, eG4u, the Sharing Cities project and SDBX365 and supported by EUROCITIES and the European Commission.
The workshop will provide an opportunity to hear from various city representatives who will share their views on how to move beyond trials and pilot project to wider implementations of standards based solutions.
Please see the online programme together with the list of showcases that will take place during this event.
Participation to the event is free of charge and open to all upon mandatory registration. Please note that Bordeaux will be very busy at this time of the year, attendees are advised to book their hotels as soon as possible. Information is available on the site.
Contact : events@etsi.org
The Smart Cities Information System (SCIS) published recommendations on how to improve European policies and funding opportunities in the areas or urban innovation and smart cities projects.
They can be consulted at http://bit.ly/2oqDrsb.
Recommendations, developed by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) are classified into four main types:
- Specific recommendations for Horizon 2020
- Recommendations for stakeholder engagement and communication of projects’ results
- General policy recommendations
- EU Support Coordination
What comes next?
SCIS is building on this initial assessment by collecting more lessons learned from projects, by conducting studies on replicability of projects and by identifying additional experiences from local, national, regional, and EU level.
Sharing your story will help providing recommendations to policy-makers to address market gaps in the smart city sector. Please contact igor.taranic@ceps.eu
5 days @CeBIT
Dr. Lutz Heuser, from the Urban Software Institute [ui!] presenting the Cockpit pilot
This year, the CeBIT show lasted between 20 and 24 March, and was entirely dedicated to the digitalisation of the world economy. From cloud technology and cybersecurity to robotics, drones and the Internet of Things (IoT), this gigantic fair showcased the latest and best products and services in the digital market.
The Smart City Forum’s stand was located in one corner of the Public Sector Parc. Coordinated by the Urban Software Institute [ui!], the whole area was dedicated to smart city projects being developed in collaboration with German cities, universities, and/or companies.
Also represented were private partners from Cologne and Munich involved in the Smarter Together and GrowSmarter ‘lighthouse’ projects, and in the Hamburg-centred Horizon 2020 funded MySmartLife and reTHINK projects.
EIP-SCC point of demonstration (Halle 7 – A14)
Under the ‘EUROPA’ banner, another stand was allocated to the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC), where three Horizon 2020-funded projects introduced themselves:
- the Green Digital Charter (GDC/GuiDanCe) initiative
- the CITYkeys performance measurement framework
- the ESPRESSO project (the acronym stands for systEmic StandardisationapPRoach to Empower Smart citieS and cOmmunities)
Over five days, visitors (mostly from industry) could obtain information on the EIP-SCC market place in general and the urban platforms in particular. Urban platforms are technological infrastructures by which cities manage data flows across their systems (sensors, cloud services, mobile devices, analytics, social media and many more). These networks help European cities manage the vast amount of data collected by public service operations and sensors (Internet of Things)[1].
Scores of flyers were handed out at that stand to explain the Green Digital Charter/GuiDance, CITYkeys, and ICTFOOTPRINT.EU projects. The 2016 collection of GDC case studies and our two handbooks on the CITYkeys framework were also available to inform visitors.
We need common and open standards
On 19 March, the opening ceremony was attended by Shinzo Abe, prime minister of Japan, partner country of CeBIT 2017, and Angela Merkel, chancellor of host country Germany. In his keynote address, Abe emphasised the importance of education and of common technology standards. “Together, let us develop common curricula and common standards”, he said.
Japan was the partner country of this 2017 edition
Common standards are key to the interoperability of different systems, and they make all smart city solutions scalable, replicable, and efficient. The CITYkeys project offers a measurement framework based on open standards and formats, which is an invaluable tool for cities aiming to improve their local decision making processes and to cooperate at European level. The key performance indicators (KPIs) developed by the CITYkeys partners have been endorsed by the ESPRESSO project, which develops a standardised integrated framework for smart cities.
Smart Cities Focus
CHORA project “Conscious City” (TU Berlin)
Just around the corner, where a humble lamp post offered visitors free wifi access, students from the Technische Universität of Berlin presented a simulation table designed to visualise patterns for collaborative urban planning. Through its ‘Conscious City’ project, the university’s architectural design and urban planning group CHORA intends to demonstrate how games and other platforms can help us co-create our urban environment.
Visitors could attend a number of conferences and sessions on ‘smart urbanism’, where the speakers elaborated on the concepts and technologies behind the drive to develop safe, clean, and efficient cities. Most of these, however, targeted German speakers only.Those curious to know what ‘smart city’ means outside the EU’s borders could attend a lecture delivered by Andrey Belozerov, deputy CIO of the city of Moscow. The recording of his thought-provoking address, entitled ‘Cities – new key drivers of digitalisation’, is available at http://www.cebit.de/event/cities-new-key-drivers-of-digitalization/KEY/74913.
Digital technologies provide great opportunities for cities to improve their local urban planning practices, and help them go a long way toward becoming sustainable, green, and inclusive. What this year’s CeBIT has confirmed again is that much depends on how we use these fast-evolving and omnipresent technologies, tools, gadgets and gizmos.. The event also left visitors wonder if the ‘rest of the world’ is ready to catch up with Europe just yet.
[1] For a more detailed explanation of urban platforms, click here to download a presentation on Vivienne Avery (Greater London Authority) or at http://bit.ly/2obDYyw.
OpenYourCity.com
This article has been originally published on OpenYourCity.com under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
“If I were to decipher the message that 2017 is bringing, I would say that data sharing and co-creation will certainly boost urban innovation in the forthcoming years. And that, in Zaragoza, we have some interesting tools to make it happen:
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our smart Citizen Card, our “de facto” digital platform upon which we can build all sorts of services, from gamification to citizen participation
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our Open Urban Lab, the co-creation lab of the city, located at the very core of Zaragoza’s flagship innovation hub “Etopia Center for Arts and Technology”
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a thriving civic and innovation ecosystem and a program “100 Ideas ZGZ” conceived to set bottom-up ideas in motion, using the city as an innovation platform
The good news started in Luxembourg. After pitching the Citizen Card in late January on the Big Data Info Days on Horizon 2020 we are overwhelmed by the number of agents from either industry and research arena that have proposed to partner with us in big data-related H2020 calls. Almost simultaneously, four groups of design students from the University of Zaragoza presented four innovative ideas for new services on the Citizen Card. They had been working on them for three months both in the classroom and in the Lab.
A week later we took a plane to Brussels: on Jan, 25th Zaragoza’s Citizen Card received the Green Digital Charter (GDC) 2016 Award on ‘Citizen participation and impact on society’. During the conference ‘Cities in Transition – the role of digital in shaping our future cities’ held in Brussels we had the opportunity to present our current and future data policy and discuss it with an engaged audience from government and academia. Take two concepts already developed in these blog’s pages: Big (open) Data, and Data Sharing.
From left to right: Daniel Sarasa, Carlos Alocen and Gerardo Lahuerta after receiving the Green Digital Charter (GDC) 2016 Award on ‘Citizen participation & impact on society’, Brussels, 25 January 2017
We need European funding to materialize these and other ideas, so we’ve been working very hard with the team on several European proposals for using data to spark and guide the co-creation of new public services. We have already tested this principle within the project CITYkeys, where data has allowed us to identify gaps and opportunities for new transport services: that’s how the future network of bicycle parking spots started to be designed. A path, that of the co-creation of new public services based on data insights, that we intend to develop further.
On Feb, 6th we enrolled on a learning trip to beautiful Cascais (Portugal) to join the “Smart Life Incubator” think tank. We were ‘locked’ by the outstanding TM Forum staff alongside other city policy makers from Tokyo, Liverpool, Nice, Porto, Saint Quentin, Cascais and Utrecht. It was an intense 3-day working session focused on addressing urban challenges through innovation and cooperation between stakeholders. We dealt with problems such as mobility, talent attraction, unemployment, on-line services,… We shared strategies to bring deprived public space back to life, or to improve city response in case of catastrophe. Surprisingly, data sharing was identified as a common enabling vector for most of the challenges. The bad news is that no one seems to know how to make it happen without compromising, either legitimate organization assets or personal privacy: the relationship between big data and governments is still heavily cluttered.
So while everybody talks about co-creation, there is an astonishingly small number of succes stories out there. Most projects, like the “Co-creating responsive urban spaces” initiative in Amsterdam, are just starting. And data sharing is something we all think should be happening (for the sake of humanity, right?) but that no one has seen yet. In my Master on City Sciences’ thesis I pointed out that there are gigantic organizational and behavioural (psychological) barriers that block the way. As more projects on co-creation start in the following years, and small scale urban data sharing examples are being built, we expect that a whole new body of knowledge about the subject will appear. This knowledge, of course, will blossom on the urban ground, since it is the natural environment where people’s ideas and big (urban) data can turn into solutions.
The story of co-creation and data sharing is just beginning. We’ll be here to write it.”
Daniel Sarasa Funes is urban innovation planner and Smart City Program Manager at Zaragoza City Council. He is co-author of Zaragoza’s digital agenda 2012-2015 “Towards a Smart Citizenship” and co-editor of OpenYourCity.com
Innovating cities with nature
H2020 Smart Cities & Communities 2016 call and nature based solutions 14 October 2015, 10.00 – 16.00 EUROCITIES office, Square de Meeûs, 1, 1000 Brussels (tbc)On 14 October, during the Brussels open days, we will organize our fourth brokerage event on smart cities, which will focus on the 2016 Horizon 2020 Smart Cities & Communities call for funding.
Merce GRIERA-I-FISA, DG CONNECT, will present the Horizon 2020 Smart Cities & Communities 2016 call and the lesson learnt from the previous round of smart cities applications.
Marie YEROYANNI and Ugo GUARNACCI, DG Research & Innovation, will look at the topic of nature based solutions and smart cities, the focus of the 2016 call for projects.
In the afternoon, will follow a Green Digital Charter technical training focusing on ICT solutions.
The event, third of its kind, follows a successful series of brokerage events attracting more than 100 city officials: see here for the documents and results of the 2014 event and here for the 2013 event.
The Horizon 2020 Smart cities calls are expected to be officially published in December 2015, but the draft version of the document has already been made available on the HORIZON 2020 website.
Horizon 2020 Smart cities 2016-2017 calls
The City of Amsterdam was the winner of the City Award at the second edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress, held November 14 in Barcelona, Spain. Amsterdam’s winning submission was an innovative Open Data Program for transport and mobility, with the motto: “We the data, you the apps.” The program, as part of the Amsterdam Smart City Approach, aims at making Amsterdam more accessible through opening public data to optimize mobility and transportation.
Amsterdam, also one of the signatory cities of the Green Digital Charter, is now working on making traffic and transportation data publicly available, in the hope that the open data will stimulate innovation for new products and mobile services to make trips more efficient whilst improving the accessibility of the city.Examples of new apps that have been created are Parkshark (Glimworm) and Bike Like a Local.
