The CISMOB Interred Europe conference was held at NOD building Kista and the theme was about Smart Cities and how ICT and openness(Figure 1) could help to improve cities’ transport infrastructure. There were many speakers from various industries and governmental organizations who shared valuable tips on how they are working towards their own smart cities. There was much emphasis on allowing data-sets to be openly available so that developers can leverage on them to create useful applications for the people.
Figure 1 Open Government approach
It was interesting that all the representatives of their own countries said that their own cities were aiming to be the smartest cities in the world. Ann Hellenius, the CIO of Stockholm shared Stockholm’s aim to solve issues related to smart traffic control, parking spaces, lighting, car pooling etc. Another speaker, the Chief Information Officer of IDA Singapore shared similar efforts being done in Singapore. Being a Singaporean, I have seen that having open data has greatly improved the livelihood of the citizens.
One of the speakers, Brendon Clark, Studio Director of Interactive Institute, also highlighted the importance of bottom up approach in creating a smart city. He explained about using various methodologies such as collaborative design, generative prototyping, and exploratory research. All these allows to look at problems from the user’s perspective thereby reducing designer bias.
With hyper fast internet connectivity, the prominent cities in the world are competing to become the world’s smartest cities. Knowledge transfer and collaboration is the key ingredients(along with others mentioned in Figure 2) to achieving this goal. Overall, it doesn’t matter which city becomes the smartest city first, it is about solving humanity’s problems using ICT.
Figure 2 Ingredients for creating a Smart City
More information about the conference can be found here:
http://www.egovlab.eu/cismob/blog/
Figure 1 from https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/ict-enabled-public-sector-innovation-horizon-2020