SMART Innovation & People CIP Project

SMART Innovation & People SMARTiP PROJECT

Contract No.

Milestone M1 Smart Citizens Vision and Strategy

Version no. 1.0

Prepared/ Updated By Dave Carter

Date 11.4.11

SMART Innovation & People CIP Project

CONTENTS

Smart Citizens in Smart Cities: Vision and Strategy 1. Smart Citizens in Smart Cities: Vision and Strategy Overview ........................................................... 3 2. Co-production in the context of developing Future Internet-enabled services................................. 4 3. Smart cities: Future Internet enabled urban development ............................................................... 6 4. Smart citizens in smart cities: elaborating the concept ..................................................................... 8 5. Conclusions: implementing the vision .............................................................................................. 10

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1. Smart Citizens in Smart Cities: Vision and Strategy Overview

The SMARTiP project starts from the premise that the development of Future Internet enabled services in smart cities should be driven by conscious efforts to ensure that digital technologies are used to improve living and working conditions and the overall quality of life, so that, in doing so, a more inclusive and sustainable urban environment can be developed. One of the main objectives of this approach is to develop user-driven open innovation in ways which maximise the active engagement of users and citizens thus enabling the co-creation and co-production of new services. The SMARTiP project is working to take the experience developed by a wide range of existing user-driven open innovation initiatives in Europe, particularly those developed through Living Labs, and to apply this experience to the challenge of transforming public services by empowering smart citizens to be able to co-create and coproduce innovative Internet-enabled services within emerging smart cities. The project will be creating a series of test-beds and demonstrators in five cities, Bologna, Cologne, Gent, Manchester and Oulu, which will support the co-production of citizen-centric Internet-enabled services. The objective is to develop co-production in innovation and dynamic ways which result in more inclusive, higher quality and more efficient public services which can then be made replicable and scalable for cross-border deployment on a larger scale. In working in this way the aim is to enhance the ability of cities to grow and sustain a smart city ecosystem which engages citizens together with city leaderships, business and the research and innovation communities. The project is starting with a series of pilot projects covering three thematic areas: Smart engagement; Smart environments; Smart mobility. The pilots aim to provide a catalyst to stimulate citizen engagement in becoming active generators of content and applications development, working both with the cities (with leaderships and staff) and with innovators, entrepreneurs and developers, and using the experience gained to become more informed and involved users of the developing Internet-enabled services in smart cities. The central vision of the project is that smart cities require smart citizens if they are to be truly inclusive, innovative and sustainable. The promise of the information society, to create new ways of empowering people to play a fuller and more equal role in emerging governance systems through their access to dynamic Internetenabled services, is also proving to be its biggest challenge, as not everyone is getting equal access to the skills and opportunities that are supposed to be there. Many previous initiatives, particularly those focusing on egovernment and e-inclusion, have tackled the digital divide only to find that the persistent inequalities blighting many urban neighbourhoods mitigate against citizen empowerment and participation within the information society. The project aims to demonstrate new approaches in which the focus is first and foremost on citizen empowerment as an essential catalyst in creating a new paradigm to transform the dynamics of data flows, management and

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service development. The potential of new bottom up approaches based on user-generated content, social media and Web 2.0 applications opens up possibilities for a new interpretation and understanding of spatial inequalities and neighbourhood effects, seen through the experiences of the citizens themselves, leading to new forms of empowerment for those citizens. This needs to enable citizens to build the social capital and capacity required to become co-creators and co-producers of new and innovative services with the means to ensure that they are delivered in more effective and inclusive ways, taking full advantage of new Internet-based technologies and applications. The project will then facilitate collaborative networking between each local smart citizens pilot and the local developer communities, including SMEs and other entrepreneurs and innovators. The aim is to ensure that pilot applications and services can be validated in real world environments in order to minimize any limits on their availability and to maximize their accessibility and subsequent deployment. The project intends to support the facilitation of emerging markets for innovation (as outlined in the recent DG INFSO Communication A Strategy for ICT R&D and Innovation in Europe: Raising the Game) by creating opportunities to trial and deploy co-production of public services using Internet-enabled technologies and applications in the five contrasting socio-economic urban environments in partner cities in the UK, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Finland. The new and, as yet, unexploited aspect of this approach is that of promoting and stimulating co-production as an essential element of the process of transforming public service delivery through Future Internet-enabled services.

2. Co-production in the context of developing Future Internet-enabled services

Co-production as a concept emerged some four decades ago but it is now developing into a practical agenda for system change which can be seen to be closely allied with the concept of co-creation in the methodology of open innovation. Co-production has emerged both as a critique of the way that professionals and users have been artificially divided and as a new way for citizens to share in the design and delivery of services, and contribute their own wisdom and experience, in ways that can broaden and strengthen services and make them more effective.1 It is based on four key principles: Recognizing people as assets; Valuing work differently; Promoting reciprocity; Building social networks.2 Internet-based technologies and services provide new opportunities for stimulating co-production while, at the same time, co-production provides new opportunities for securing citizens engagement and active involvement in the process of developing smart services which, in turn, can help to accelerate the uptake of these technologies and services. This virtuous circle is then capable of enhancing cities ability to grow and sustain innovation

Boyle, D. & Harris, M. (2009) The Challenge of Co-production: how equal partnerships between professionals and the public are crucial to improving public services. New Economic Foundation (NEF), The Lab, NESTA. London.
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Cahn, E. (2001) No More Throwaway People: The Co-production Imperative. Washington DC. Essential Books.

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ecosystems and, through this, to develop more inclusive, higher quality and efficient services which are then capable of being replicable and scalable for wider cross-border deployment on a much larger scale. The project will be deploying currently available Internet-based technologies and services to develop a series of pilot projects, initially focusing on three thematic areas: Smart engagement: stimulating citizen engagement with analyzing and implementing data which is generated both from institutions, e.g. through commitments to Open Data and by citizens themselves, which can then be visualized in ways which can support participatory planning, including around budgeting and financial issues, for smart communities and smart services. This will also include innovative ways of ensuring that all citizens can gain access to these new Internet-enabled services, including through developing citizen based support services for elderly and disabled people through the co-production of care services involving social care professionals, volunteers, carers and family and community networks; Smart environments: engaging citizens in monitoring and action to support the co-production of environmental services, including air quality, open spaces, waste management and improved built environments; Smart mobility: supporting citizen monitoring of personal travel routes using public and private transport, cycling and walking with the aggregation and analysis of data to support smart mobility planning for individuals, social groups and institutions.

The aim of the pilot projects is to demonstrate how the wider deployment of Internet-based technologies and services can be enhanced through co-production and, in turn, provide new and more innovative approaches to bring together both the e-government and e-inclusion agendas with the Future Internet agenda to tackle these inter-connected policy agendas in a more holistic way. The added value for the users is that they have a real incentive to become more involved as co-producers, as well as users, of the content and services available in the emerging smart cities through having access to new skills, employment possibilities and quality of life. It is this which can then make these approaches more sustainable, by embedding the pro-active involvement of citizens in all aspects of designing and delivering services and thus providing both citizens and the public authorities responsible for providing these services with a new rationale to make the PPPP Public-Private-People Partnership approach viable and desirable. The relationship between the concept of co-production and the thematic focus of the project is illustrated below.

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Co-production across themes Recognizing people as assets Smart engagement Consumers of data & apps to producers of data & apps, e.g. participatory budgeting with citizens moving from personal budgeting to public/civic budgeting Citizens as active co-creators in analysing the needs of local communities Smart environments Citizens as sensors and sensing networks Smart mobility People mapping themselves on the move

Valuing work differently

Promoting reciprocity

Service efficiencies creating new community investment funds

Building social networks

Developing new social capital New collaborative approaches to holistic planning including a citizens data aggregator resource management

People engaged in environmental improvements on a equal basis with professionals Citizens being resourced to improved the quality of life Identifying and activating citizens capacity

People maps as a tool in improving mobility planning and delivery Incentivising greener and more effective ways of improving mobility Creating innovative new mobility possibilities

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Each pilot project will focus on combining existing prototypes, using available Internet-based technologies, e.g. mobile and location based services, next generation access (NGA) service networks and applications based on the emerging Internet of Things, including RFID, sensors and networks, and describing the adaptation work required to develop these into the four targeted service areas outlined above. This will include the development of business plans not only for the proposed thematic services specifically but also more generally for the new business models which will be proposed to take forward all such services as the basis of replicating, scaling up and sustaining their development on a more holistic basis.

3. Smart cities: Future Internet enabled urban development

There is a dynamic discourse emerging around the concept of smart cities with a very wide range of actors generating ideas about the concept, what it could and should mean, how it can best be achieved and what are likely to be the opportunities and challenges encountered along the way. A full range of options and possibilities are being discussed, ranging from the most optimistic views of how tech-powered cities will revolutionise the way we live to more sceptical views which are critical of perceived dangers in global technology companies ... offering smart city in a box solutions which threaten to hand corporations the keys to our privacy. Parts of this debate have been characterised as a battle for the soul of the smart city3, with corporations on one side and
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th

Fast Company magazine, article by Greg Lindsay, Dec. 16 2010: http://www.fastcompany.com/1710342/the-battle-

for-the-soul-of-the-smart-city

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entrepreneurs, hackers and citizen hacktivists4 on another. Consequently the smart city concept is highly contested but this is just as likely to stimulate greater awareness and interest in this discourse as to constrain it. The most important thing is that projects, such as SMARTiP and the other projects with the Smart City Portfolio, are aware of the discourse and can feedback into it a credible European perspective based on real evidence, experience and expertise. The concept of smart cities is being taken up by many cities as a strategic priority which recognises the growing importance of digital technologies in enabling the commitments of those cities to competitiveness and sustainability. At the same time the term is being used as a marketing concept by both cities and businesses to provide an image for what they believe a future city should be like. The main focus is on cities being greener, with smart energy, smart environments and smart mobility, and more liveable, with smart health, smart education and smart living/working. This focus on sustainability and quality of life has also stimulated concern that not enough attention is being paid to the question of inclusiveness and this is now emerging as an important cross-cutting theme, especially within the Digital Agenda for Europe. The issue of inclusiveness, or e-inclusion, is also closely related to concerns about citizens acceptance of internet-enabled services, within the wider context of issues relating to trust, security and privacy. All of the participating cities in the SMARTiP project are members of the Eurocities network5 and, in order to generate a wider discussion with other cities, the project co-ordinator, the City of Manchester, is working together with the City of Barcelona (involved in the coordination of one of the other Smart Cities Portfolio projects, Open Cities6) in developing a Smart Cities Working Group within the Eurocities Knowledge Society Forum (KSF). The Working Group met for the first time at the KSF meeting in Ghent on April 8th 2011 and will work in partnership with the Smart Cities Portfolio Working Group (of seven CIP 2010 ICT-PSP projects and the APOLLON CIP 2009 project), the FIREBALL FP7 Coordination Action and the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) to ensure knowledge sharing, joint planning of events and joint dissemination activities. The main aim of this collaboration is to generate a dynamic dialogue around the conceptualisation and strategic definition of the smart city, including working to understand and exchange ideas about the diversity of smart city strategies and policies in Europe and globally.

Institute for the Future report: A planet of civic laboratories: the future of cities, information and inclusion:

http://www.iftf.org/inclusion
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www.eurocities.eu

www.opencities.net

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The first stage of this work is capture data about definitions around the following questions: What is a Smart City - are the definitions currently being used? What are the components that make up a smart city? Which services should cities have in order to be smart? Which infrastructures should be prioritised? What do cities wishing to be a smart city aspire to? The results of this work will then feed into the Smart Cities Roadmap being produced as part of the FIREBALL project and the development of a knowledge base of best practices being produced in collaboration with the Smart Cities Portfolio Working Group.

4. Smart citizens in smart cities: elaborating the concept

The SMARTiP project is one part of what it is hoped will be an emerging eco-system of projects, local initiatives and cross-border collaborations which will enable the smart cities concept to be more fully elaborated and backed up with practical examples of what works, where the greatest challenges lie and sources of expertise which cities and their partners can call on for advice and support. Within this context the SMARTiP project focuses on smart citizens as both active sources of service production and engaged users of services, prosumers and peer providers. The project will assess existing grass roots, user-driven, action by citizens using internet-enabled services, as well as stimulate new action, to identify how citizens can best build social capital to acquire the capacities, skills and aspirations to become co-producers of future internet-enabled services in smart cities. This work will include: a) Analysing existing good practices where citizens are actively engaged in content and service generation; b) Developing the pilot projects to stimulate new and innovative practice, supported through cross-border exchange of knowledge and expertise and the creation of a collaborative knowledge base; c) Working on the idea of a smart cities services generator which can take the practices and showcases developed in one city and reuse these in another city, backed up by advice and support from project partners using best practice to support knowledge transfer, based on the principles of open access, open data and open source (e.g. using Creative Commons to develop new co-ownership models). This work aims to build upon the conceptual basis of what is a smart city? as elaborated in the 2010 CIP Work Programme, i.e. a smart city being a city that makes a conscious effort to uptake innovative ICT based solutions to improve conditions of living and working and support a more inclusive and sustainable urban environment.. It will be taking account of the growing discourse on different definitions of what a smart city is or should be, as outlined above, and aiming to set down a series of benchmarks defining good practices in relation to citizen engagement and to both the principles and the practices of co-production. The first elaboration will demonstrate the linkages between smart city visions which are focused on one primary issue (more vertical themes), as with responses to climate change and the equation that smart cities are about smart energy and related policy drivers, and the visions which are trying to be multi-dimensional, focusing on diversity and inclusion issues (more horizontal themes). The objective is to put human agency at the centre of both trends and to try to ensure that the idea of smart citizens is applicable to all aspects of smart city strategies and policies. The SMARTiP project partners, led by Manchester and Ghent, for example are working within Eurocities to

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articulate a positive response to the recent EC public consultation on the forthcoming Smart Cities and Communities Initiative7. This initiative is to be very much welcomed, especially given its strong links with the Covenant of Mayors Sustainable Energy Action Plans. It also provides a further opportunity, however, to articulate the smart citizens in smart cities concept, which is at the heart of the Eurocities response to the consultation: A smart city integrates state of the art green technologies to create a city that is both sustainable and can deliver high living standards. A smart city leads the way towards CO2 neutrality and delivers solutions (infrastructure etc.) for its inhabitants that are cost effective and efficient. At the same time it is a healthy, energy-efficient city that uses renewable energy sources as much as possible, including biomass and waste, and is a pioneer in the deployment of advanced smart technologies. A smart city is also an inclusive place, using technology and innovative solutions to increase social inclusion and combat poverty and deprivation. Overall, a smart city must be a good place to live, offering the best possible quality of life, with the lowest possible use of resources.8 Similar thinking is happening in the area of Future Internet, where the recent DGINFSO Report Towards a Future Internet (coordinated by the Oxford Internet Institute)9 aims to set out Guiding principles for a needs-based future internet, which includes the idea that the democratization of access to knowledge which has been enabled by online collaborative tools (wikis, blogs, P2P, etc) has been a key element favouring free exchange of information between people, public debate and innovation. The analysis and the preservation of this open and inclusive character of the current internet should be central to any prospects for future developments. Others active in the EU Future Internet PPP are also keen to promote active engagement by users and citizens in defining the future rules and practices of the future internet. In a contribution to the PPP Usage Area Workshop ARUP set out some of their ideas for exploring and testing the possibilities of contemporary and future ICT in transforming the city into a smart city: A smart city is one in which the seams and structures of the various urban systems are made clear, simple and even malleable via contemporary technology and design. Citizens are not only engaged and informed in the relationship between their activities, their neighbourhoods, and the wider urban ecosystems, but are actively encouraged to see the city itself as something they can collectively tune, such that it is efficient, interactive, engaging, adaptive and flexible, as opposed to the inflexible, mono-functional and monolithic structures of many 20th century cities. Similarly, even where the focus is more technological, on ICTs as tools for city management, there is a growing recognition of the need to do more to harness technology to enable, engage and empower city stakeholders10, including a commitment to ensuring that the success of e-government and similar initiatives demands not only a basic level of wealth and education for poorer citizens to cross the digital divide: it also require recognition on the part of bureaucrats of the organisational and human changes that citizens have come to expect from interconnected cities.
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http://ec.europa.eu/energy/technology/consultations/20110513_smart_cities_en.htm Eurocities Response to Public Consultation on the Smart Cities and Communities Initiative (Draft). March 2011. http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/fire/future-internet-and-society_en.html ICT for City Management, Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Siemens (2010): www.siemens.com/city-of-the-future

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The real challenge is still, however, to create active citizen engagement in the planning, development and delivery of future internet-enabled services in ways which are accessible, empowering and sustainable. There is certainly a much wider appreciation of why this is being suggested or, in some cases, demanded, but this has not yet been matched by action at any widespread or systematic level. This is why the project partners are committed to the three step approach outlined above: Firstly, identifying and analysing good practice, e.g. OpenApps development, Apps4 places11, which are felt to be relevant and (potentially) transferrable to the pilot projects being developed within the project; Secondly, acting as a catalyst to generate pilot projects that build on existing good practice at a local level but which also embrace new developments from across Europe and globally which are identified through supporting networks, such as Eurocities and ENoLL; Thirdly, drawing out the lessons learned to identify how best to use and re-use the results from the pilot projects, both in terms of enhancing the scope and scale at a local level, through extending their reach and developing new business models applicable locally, and in terms of wider replicability, through the services generator idea, to support the re-use of pilot services, starting with each being replicated in at least one other smart city setting within the partnership.

5. Conclusions: implementing the vision

The purpose of this milestone report is to set out the collective learning of the project partners to date, in terms of what a Smart City could and should be, and to identify the way that the project will build on this as the pilot projects are developed and plans are implemented for replicating and re-using the pilot services through a crossborder collaborative network. The project vision is based on creating citizen-centric, user-driven approaches to the co-creation and co-production of future internet-enabled services in smart cities. This involves three main elements: a) An explicit statement of the projects commitment to, and experience of, citizen engagement in defining both the vision and the implementation for all of the elements that need to make up the building blocks of the smart city, particularly openness, inclusiveness and sustainability; b) Practical demonstration through the pilot projects of how those principles are put into practice, especially in terms of usability, interoperability, flexibility, security and reliability, and the creation of a genuinely cross-border collaborative network to develop this practice; c) Setting out the foundations of the services generator idea as a central element of the projects sustainability strategy, demonstrating how the pilot projects contribute to the smart city vision delivering this on a cross-border basis. The project has developed some initial benchmarks for mapping and evaluating progress towards this end, providing the starting point for a smart citizens in smart cities applications platform that would, in turn, provide support for the development of the services generator idea. These are: Local leadership support for the development of the pilot services at the highest level;
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Examples include: http://www.verkkodemokratia.fi/apps4finland and http://www.gov20.de/apps-4-berlin/

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Momentum established which can support the creation of a critical mass of citizen, user and developer engagement; Buy-in from key stakeholders from within the user communities and citizen networks; Accessible applications and user groups which are seen as attractive and fun by users; Future Internet technologies are available and accessible, e.g. locative technologies, wearables, networked objects meet web-centric systems; Identifiable progress towards co-production which results in service transformation.

These will be used to evaluate project progress and to feedback into future iterations of the Smart City Vision, not only for the project but also for the wider collaborative networks being developed through the Smart Cities Portfolio Working Group, Eurocities and ENoLL and the Future Internet for Smart Cities Roadmap being developed through the FIREBALL Coordination Action. In conclusion, therefore, the SMARTiP project offers the following vision as the starting point for Smart Citizens in Smart Cities: Smart Cities will have smart citizens at their heart, enabling them to have the capacity and confidence to use state-of-the-art future internet technologies to transform the way they live and work and their quality of life. Future internet-enabled smart citizens will collaborate in new and dynamic ways, co-owning new ways of planning and delivering services and co-producing services both for themselves and for those that they live with, care for and work with. Smart citizens in smart cities will be part of new cross-border collaborations across Europe and globally, using future-internet technologies to create new economic and social opportunities for working and for living. Smart cities will enable smart citizens to make their environments greener, cleaner and healthier as well as more open and inclusive. Smart citizens in smart cities will ensure that smart cities are more democratic, resilient and attractive, using future internet-enabled services to generate and celebrate creativity, innovation and diversity.

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