Empowering cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The real story on how citizens and businesses are driving smart cities” by the Economist Intelligence Unit: “Digital technologies are the lifeblood of today’s cities. They are applied widely in industry and society, from information and communications technology (ICT) to the Internet of Things (IoT), in which objects are connected to the Internet. As sensors turn any object into part of an intelligent urban network, and as computing power facilitates analysis of the data these sensors collect, elected officials and city administrators can gain an unparalleled understanding of the infrastructure and services of their city. However, to make the most of this intelligence, another ingredient is essential: citizen engagement. Thanks to digital technologies, citizens can provide a steady flow of feedback and ideas to city officials.

This study by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), supported by Philips Lighting, investigates how citizens and businesses in 12 diverse cities around the world—Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Singapore and Toronto—envision the benefits of smart cities. The choices of the respondents to the survey reflect the diverse nature of the challenges and opportunities facing different cities, from older cities in mature markets, where technology is at work with infrastructure that may be centuries old, to new cities in emerging markets, which have the opportunity to incorporate digital technologies as they grow.

Coupled with expert perspectives, these insights paint a fresh picture of how digital technologies can empower people to contribute-giving city officials a roadmap to smart city life in the 21st century….(More)”

Sustainable Smart Cities: Creating Spaces for Technological, Social and Business Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Peris-Ortiz, Marta, Bennett, Dag, and Pérez-Bustamante Yábar, Diana: “This volume provides the most current research on smart cities. Specifically, it focuses on the economic development and sustainability of smart cities and examines how to transform older industrial cities into sustainable smart cities.  It aims to identify the role of the following elements in the creation and management of smart cities:

  • Citizen participation and empowerment
  • Value creation mechanisms
  • Public administration
  • Quality of life and sustainability
  • Democracy
  • ICT
  • Private initiatives and entrepreneurship

Regardless of their size, all cities are ultimately agglomerations of people and institutions. Agglomeration economies make it possible to attain minimum efficiencies of scale in the organization and delivery of services. However, the economic benefits do not constitute the main advantage of a city. A city’s status rests on three dimensions: (1) political impetus, which is the result of citizens’ participation and the public administration’s agenda; (2) applications derived from technological advances (especially in ICT); and (3) cooperation between public and private initiatives in business development and entrepreneurship. These three dimensions determine which resources are necessary to create smart cities. But a smart city, ideal in the way it channels and resolves technological, social and economic-growth issues, requires many additional elements to function at a high-performance level, such as culture (an environment that empowers and engages citizens) and physical infrastructure designed to foster competition and collaboration, encourage new ideas and actions, and set the stage for new business creation. …(More)”.

Seeing Cities Through Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Thakuriah, Piyushimita (Vonu), Tilahun, Nebiyou, and Zellner, Moira: “… introduces the latest thinking on the use of Big Data in the context of urban systems, including  research and insights on human behavior, urban dynamics, resource use, sustainability and spatial disparities, where it promises improved planning, management and governance in the urban sectors (e.g., transportation, energy, smart cities, crime, housing, urban and regional economies, public health, public engagement, urban governance and political systems), as well as Big Data’s utility in decision-making, and development of indicators to monitor economic and social activity, and for urban sustainability, transparency, livability, social inclusion, place-making, accessibility and resilience…(More)”

The well-informed city: A decentralized, bottom-up model for a smart city service using information and self-organization

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Eyal Feder-Levy, Efrat Blumenfeld-Liebertal, and Juval Portugali for the Smart Cities Conference (ISC2), 2016 IEEE International: “Smart Cities, a concept widely growing in popularity, describes cities that use digital technology, data analysis and connectivity to create value. The basic abstraction of a Smart City service includes collecting data about an urban issue, transmitting it to a central decision making process and “improving” the city with the insights generated. This model has spurred much critique, claiming Smart Cities are undemocratic, discriminatory and cannot significantly improve citizen’s quality of life. But what if the citizens were active in the process? It was Jane Jacobs who said “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” In this paper we lay a conceptual groundwork to envision “The Well-Informed City” — a decentralized, self-organizing Smart City service, where the value is created by everybody. The agents, who are the citizens of the city, are the ones who use the data to create value. We base the model on the cities’ feature of Self-Organization as described in the domain of Complexity Theory of Cities. We demonstrate its theoretical possibility, describe a short case study and finish with suggestions for future empirical research. This work is highly significant due to the ubiquitous nature of contemporary mobile based information services and growing open data sets….(More)”

Helping Smart Cities Harness Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Linda Poon in CityLab: “Harnessing the power of open data is key to developing the smart cities of the future. But not all governments have the capacity—be that funding or human capital—to collect all the necessary information and turn it into a tool. That’s where Mapbox comes in.

Mapbox offers open-source mapping platforms, and is no stranger to turning complex data into visualizations cities can use, whether it’s mapping traffic fatalities in the U.S. or the conditions of streets in Washington, D.C., during last year’s East Coast blizzard. As part of the White House Smart Cities Initiative, which announced this week that it would make more than $80 million in tech investments this year, the company is rolling out Mapbox Cities, a new “mentorship” program that, for now, will give three cities the tools and support they need to solve some of their most pressing urban challenges. It issued a call for applications earlier this week, and responses have poured in from across the globe says Christina Franken, who specializes in smart cities at Mapbox.

“It’s very much an experimental approach to working with cities,” she says. “A lot of cities have open-data platforms but they don’t really do something with the data. So we’re trying to bridge that gap.”

During Hurricane Sandy, Mapbox launched a tool to help New Yorkers figure out if they were in an evacuation zone. (Mapbox)

But the company isn’t approaching the project blindly. In a way, Mapbox has the necessary experience to help cities jumpstart their own projects. Its resume includes, for example, a map that visualizes the sheer quantity of traffic fatalities along any commuting route in the U.S., showcasing its ability to turn a whopping five years’ worth of data into a public-safety tool. During 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, they created a disaster-relief tool to help New Yorkers find shelter.

And that’s just in the United States. Mapbox recently also started a group focusing primarily on humanitarian issues and bringing their mapping and data-collecting tools to aid organizations all over the world in times of crisis. It provides free access to its vast collection of resources, and works closely with collaborators to help them customize maps based on specific needs….(More)”

How Citizen Attachment to Neighborhoods Helps to Improve Municipal Services and Public Spaces

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daniel O’Brien, Dietmar Offenhuber, Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Melissa Sands, and Eric Gordon: “What motivates people to contact their local governments with reports about street light outages, potholes, graffiti, and other deteriorations in public spaces? Current efforts to improve government interactions with constituents operate on the premise that citizens who make such reports are motivated by broad civic values. In contrast, our recent research demonstrates that such citizens are primarily motivated by territoriality – that is, attachments to the spaces where they live. Our research focuses on Boston’s “311 system,” which provides telephone hotlines and web channels through which constituents can request non-emergency government services.

Although our study focuses on 311 users in Boston, it holds broader implications for more than 400 U.S. municipalities that administer similar systems. And our results encourage a closer look at the drivers of citizen participation in many “coproduction programs” – programs that involve people in the design and implementation of government services. Currently, 311 is just one example of government efforts to use technology to involve constituents in joint efforts.

Territorial Ties and Civic Engagement

The concept of territoriality originated in studies of animal behavior – such as bears marking trees in the forest or lions and hyenas fighting over a kill. Human beings also need to manage the ownership of objects and spaces, but social psychologists have demonstrated that human territoriality, whether at home, the workplace, or a neighborhood, entails more than the defense of objects or spaces against others. It includes maintenance and caretaking, and even extends to items shared with others….(More)”

Smart Economy in Smart Cities

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Book edited by Vinod Kumar, T. M.: “The present book highlights studies that show how smart cities promote urban economic development. The book surveys the state of the art of Smart City Economic Development through a literature survey. The book uses 13 in depth city research case studies in 10 countries such as the North America, Europe, Africa and Asia to explain how a smart economy changes the urban spatial system and vice versa. This book focuses on exploratory city studies in different countries, which investigate how urban spatial systems adapt to the specific needs of smart urban economy. The theory of smart city economic development is not yet entirely understood and applied in metropolitan regional plans. Smart urban economies are largely the result of the influence of ICT applications on all aspects of urban economy, which in turn changes the land-use system. It points out that the dynamics of smart city GDP creation takes ‘different paths,’ which need further empirical study, hypothesis testing and mathematical modelling. Although there are hypotheses on how smart cities generate wealth and social benefits for nations, there are no significant empirical studies available on how they generate urban economic development through urban spatial adaptation.  This book with 13 cities research studies is one attempt to fill in the gap in knowledge base….(More)”

Hype Cycle for Digital Government Technology, 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gartner: “This Hype Cycle helps government agencies eager to embrace digital transformation by highlighting critical technologies that can be adopted quickly.

What You Need to Know

Austerity continues to impact governments, and the requirement to transform is substantial. Years of cuts have left IT departments struggling to operate bimodally, focused on maintaining operations, but not delivering innovation. Effective and efficient mission delivery necessitates more technology, not less, so senior organizational leaders look outside the IT department to source innovation and additional capacity. Digital government demands improvements in the value chain, using end-to-end frictionless transactions, as the outcome of technical and process improvement. CIOs’ focus must move from infrastructure and its costs toward quickly delivering true mission outcome improvements.

This Hype Cycle highlights technologies that government CIOs should be implementing or planning for to ensure the organization obtains the necessary, impactful capabilities to deliver the digital government agenda quickly. To maintain their own relevance, government CIOs must recognize their organizations’ need for innovation and be mindful of the top trends and technologies disrupting their organizations.

The Hype Cycle

This Hype Cycle addresses all geographies and tiers of government tackling the opportunities presented by digital disruptions. The technologies herein support digital government and the global trends identified in“The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for Government in 2016.” These technologies align to one or more of the trends and offer a mix of benefits, from increased effectiveness and efficiency, to improved security and enhanced customer interaction. Our intention is to draw attention to those technologies that map directly to these trends, and their inclusion is explained in the section “Off the Hype Cycle.”

Slower economic growth, higher debt, rising citizen expectations and an aging population demand innovative delivery of citizen-facing services, so the ROI to support investment in these technologies must be measured in more-effective outcomes. Agencies crave new solutions and capabilities to help ease the pressure on them, and they think that, if not delivered by their incumbent IT provider, they will increasingly source directly.

The technologies selected provide practical and pragmatic choices for those CIOs who need to deliver strategic solutions to enhance organizational capabilities. Use Cloud Office and Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) to deliver a better digital workplace experience, or make better use of open data by using data quality tools, API marketplaces, and geospatial and location intelligence tools. We also offer a glimpse of the future to provide a better understanding of how smart machines, such as Smart Robots or Cognitive Expert Advisors, will impact your agency. In either case, using the technologies highlighted here and using Strategic Technology Maps to assess what priority and when you might be able to move will assist the business in knowing when functionality will become available. This knowledge may inspire the use of commercially available capabilities and forgo the desire for customers to self-source solutions.

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Digital Government, 2016

Source: Gartner (July 2016)

The Priority Matrix

The Priority Matrix shows those technologies and the time frame by which they are expected to mature and deliver benefits. Transformational and high benefits accrue immediately and run forward, delivering across the next decade. It is no surprise seeing that immediate benefits accrue to tactical investment technologies, such as Social Media Engagement Applications. They allow government agencies to go beyond monitoring citizen satisfaction by giving them a level of analysis and allowing them to engage in an informed two-way debate. Thus, multichannel citizen engagement can become a measured reality, taking government out to where the citizens communicate. This is supported by customer engagement hubs that allow personalized, contextual engagement with customers across all interaction channels, regardless of medium.

Smart Machines and the Internet of Things (IoT) are also featured this year, with real examples of technologies to help smart cities progress, with the inclusion of smart transportation solutions and an IOT platform that can help government agencies deal with the plethora of data sources that will undoubtedly emerge. It must be noted, these technologies operate as digital platforms, per se. “Implementing once, serving many” must become a mantra for digital government if it is to succeed at being both effective and efficient.

Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Digital Government, 2016

Source: Gartner (July 2016)…(More).”

Datavores of Local Government

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Tom Symons at NESTA: “How data can help councils provide more personalised, effective and efficient services.

Key findings

  • After years of hype and little delivery, councils are now using big and small data in a range of innovative ways to improve decision making and inform public service transformation.
  • Emerging trends in the use of data include predictive algorithms, mass data integration across the public sector, open data and smart cities.
  • We identify seven ways in which councils can get more value from the data they hold.

What does the data revolution mean for councils and local public services? Local government collects huge amounts of data, about everything from waste collection to procurement processes to care services for some of the most vulnerable people in society. By using council data better, is there potential to make these services more personalised, more effective and more efficient?

Nesta’s Local Datavores research programme aims to answer this question. Where, how and to what extent can better data use can help councils to achieve their strategic objectives? This report is the first in a series, aimed primarily at helping local public sector staff, from senior commissioners through to frontline professionals, get more value from the data they hold….(More)”-

From smart city to open city: Lessons from Jakarta Smart City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Putri, D.A., CH Karlina, M., Tanaya, J., at the Centre for Innovation Policy and Governance, Indonesia: “In 2011, Indonesia started its Open Government journey when along with seven other countries it initiated Open Government Partnership. Following the global declaration, Indonesia launched the Open Government Indonesia (OGI) in January 2012 with the aim to introduce open government reforms, including open data. This initiative is supported by Law No. 14/2008 on Freedom of Information. Despite its early stage, the implementation of Open Government in Indonesia has shown promising developments, with three action plans enacted in the last four years. In the Southeast Asian region, Indonesia could be considered a pioneer in implementing the open data initiative at national as well as sub-national levels. In some cases, the open data initiative at sub- national level has even surpassed the progress at the national level. Jakarta, for example, became the first city to have its own gubernatorial bylaw on data and system management, which requires the city administration and agencies to open its public data, thus leading to the birth of open data initiatives in the city. The city also have Jakarta Smart City that connect sub-districts officials with the citizen. Jakarta Smart City is an initiative that promote openness of the government through public service delivery. This paper aims to take a closer look on the dynamics of citizens-generated data in Jakarta and how Jakarta smart city program contributes to the implementation of open data….(More)”