Starting in small steps

Smart City concepts and IoT became increasingly attractive for many people, provoking intense discussions, conferences, meetings, publications and events. There is common understanding that urban areas are quickly changing along with the climate and more intelligent ways of its managing are necessary.

However looking beyond the buzz into practical solutions which are based on new smart technologies, the interplay between administrations, planning and deployment providers, and the upsides and shortfalls of new solutions is still fairly difficult for the most of communities internationally.

What does a “Smart City” actually means for real middle size city or town? What are the practical needs, possible benefits and challenges? How to foster the capacity of each community for smart management of complex urban processes, have it transparent, effectively improve life quality and attract investments and tourists without negative impacts to the community life? What need to be done to make residents happier by the next elections? How to have the results presented to the citizens in simple way and enable their participation?

Answering these and many other relevant questions requires expertise and deep knowledge of concrete local communities, its infrastructure, life patterns, resources as well as experience in implementation of Smart City projects. However, to date, there are no examples of effective integrated solutions to all these issues.

Due to the complexity and scale of the whole Urban System of Systems, novelty of many technologies required for Smart City projects, its quick change and high costs there is principally no way to implement and have the Smart City project “Just Right”.

Smart City prototyping and experimenting

The level of investments and relevant risks require adaptive strategy of Smart City concepts implementation in the multiple cycles of “planning – prototyping – experimenting - evaluation the results”. It fosters  

• Minimizing the overall costs and risks while maximum results to avoid big investments and relevant risks
• Evaluating the achievements, result and efficiencies after each small step  
• Better understanding of needs and achievements, possibilities and consequences
• Accumulating the knowledge and learning about the future to come helping community to formulate own vision, approaches and priorities
• Selection of the solutions which are the best for the local environment
• Effective presenting the successful achievements to the citizens for their acceptance  
• Scaling up the best selected solutions to achieve predictable results ensuring success of Smart City implementation and its high Return on Investments
• Becoming better prepared and save the costs of the future infrastructural adaptation
• Experimenting with new business models, the options enabling digital economy to obtain leading role as innovative community attracting investments and improving the quality of life

Realized by multidisciplinary team including city specialists, urban planners and local service providers, the project begins by building up a local Smart City Team as small core group of local specialists to support the project planning and developing the local Smart City Model.

The main stages of the project could include as follows:

• Analyzing the concept status and achievements, discussion of the options applicable to the local Smart City project 
• Reviewing new options provided by latest technologies and social scientists who can help cities to unlock the potential where administrators didn’t look
• Making local businesses aware of new smart options by presenting opportunities and engaging them into the discussion of their interests and possible contributions
• Formulating the community objectives such as maximizing citizen benefits, enabling commercially successful services and mitigating climate change, supporting of the tourism and citizens, making the implementation of the city administration tasks more efficient and transparent to citizens while optimizing the costs
• Discussing the issues with infrastructure providers to gain a better understanding of the often unspoken constraints that cities operate under
• Prioritizing the list of objectives accordingly to its added value and expected costs
• Selecting the ones with the highest priorities which can be implemented with minimum costs but introduce maximum benefits for the community in economic or financial terms
• Formulating the plan of actions putting the main focus on experimenting and knowledge gains
• Realizing the first small steps with minimum costs and maximum knowledge and outcomes at each step of the implementation

The ultimate goals of the prototyping and experimenting are as follows:

• Developing practical knowledge
• Identifying and demonstrating smart practical examples and solutions
• Implementing instruments and concepts that have been proven in practice and can be scaled up without risks
• Realizing the potential to foster transition to digital economies, holistic vision of the city life and its quality, innovative and cross-linked tools and solutions in order to make the energy supply efficient and environmentally friendly, formulate energy service models, smart and sustainable city districts, smart citizens and attractiveness for tourists and investors

Contributing to Smart City prototyping and knowledge development

GOLEM IMS GMBH, ASIDEES and national partners offer municipalities of middle and small size cities effective support in the implementation of Smart City Monitor urban technology as a key component of Smart City project success. By enabling digital transformation, holistic vision of all urban processes in real time and providing rich set of customized information and control services to all stakeholders including the citizens, it becomes the instrument for experimenting with advanced Smart City solutions, digital economy and agenda, new business models and quick evaluation of results by everyone.

As a part of the Smart City project which has multiple large infrastructural components the Smart City Monitor has a tiny fraction of total project costs and require minimum investments while providing strong basis for the success of the whole project. Its implementation in the urban communities consists of the following practical steps:

• Smart City awareness workshop for relevant stakeholders
• Building the local Smart City Team (SCT) to lead planning and developments
• Training the SCT enabling its capacity to develop local urban model, its maintenance and experimenting with local information services for the stakeholders   
• Setting the local platform Smart City Monitor, interactive Smart City Model builder and initial Smart City Model accordingly to major international standards such as ISO 37120 and others
• Linking the urban model to the open data sources available in the community
• Planning and installing new data sources, IoT devices and sensors for selected civic infrastructural objects accordingly to the Smart City implementation plan
• Evaluating the customized digital transformation content and the efficiency of its use by stakeholder groups, providing feedback to the technology provider for prompt upgrading
• Trying, experimenting and piloting, identifying most effective local solutions and scaling them up
• Sharing the results and experiences with the other local communities in region, country and EU

Additional information:

The financing opportunities for the Smart City projects are described here

The additional information about the project content is presented here

Contact us for discussing further details of the Smart City project prototyping practical solution for your community with minimum investments and risks.