Topic: open-data

This city portrait is in two parts. The first part (Alba Iulia Smart City: How Central Romania Quietly Created a Hidden Champion in Europe) described the ambitious plans of the Alba Iulia City Hall as it uses tourism and strong partnerships with private companies to transform Alba Iulia into Romania’s first smart city. This second part takes a closer look at some of the smart solutions being implemented there.

A comparatively small American city in the very center of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto has thrown itself into the smart city scene, founding a number of tech-driven projects to solve the problems of its 67,000 citizens. The first challenge to overcome, however, is its size: Palo Alto will need to pioneer smart resource management in order to fund the deployment of its smart city initiatives and the larger-scale implementation of any successful solutions.

This city portrait is in two parts. This first part describes the ambitious plans of the Alba Iulia City Hall as it uses tourism and strong partnerships to transform Alba Iulia into Romania’s first smart city. The second part takes a closer look at some of the more than 100 smart city solutions being implemented there.

This city portrait is in two parts. The first part, Seoul Smart City: The Power of Citizen Participation, described the reorganization of the Seoul Municipal Government in order to empower citizens and create a stronger climate of citizen participation at all possible administrative levels. The second part takes a closer look at some of the specific smart solutions being implemented by the city.

This city portrait is in two parts. This first part describes the reorganization of the Seoul Municipal Government in order to empower citizens and create a stronger climate of citizen participation at all possible administrative levels. The second part, Seoul Smart City: Collaboration & Smart Solutions, takes a closer look at some of the specific smart solutions being implemented by the city.

Zaragoza: Pioneering a Citizen-Centric Smart City Vision

Fifteen years ago, Zaragoza - the historic Spanish city situated between Madrid and Barcelona - pioneered a vision of a future digital district and knowledge-based society. Since then, the city has developed an impressive portfolio of smart city projects and new urban services. According to Daniel Sarasa, Urban Innovation Planner in Zaragoza and internationally recognized smart city innovator, one of Zaragoza's unique strengths is its culture of citizen involvement and participation. This culture has its roots in the reawakening of democracy. In the late 1970s, the city of Zaragoza (like other cities in Spain) looked back on thirty five years of dictatorship – and looked ahead to an uncertain future. During the years of dictatorship, Zaragoza had grown in population from approximately 235,000 to more than 500,000, but the civic infrastructure and public services needed to support this urban growth were inhibited by an autocratic national government which maintained severe austerity measures.

ICF Top 7 Intelligent Communities – Ipswich (Queensland, Australia)

The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) releases an annual selection of seven different communities which it considers to have achieved a certain level of intelligence in the way they respond to the challenges of globalization and urbanization or, as the ICF prefers to call it, the Broadband Economy. The selection of communities for 2018 was released in February, and can be found listed on the bee smart city website. The Intelligent Community of the Year was chosen from among the Top 7 and announced at the ICF Global Summit in June.

Ipswich, Australia - Following a Holistic Smart City Program

The city of Ipswich is young – that is to say, it has the youngest population on average in all of Queensland, Australia – and it is also growing faster than any other city in the state. Currently boasting around 200,000 inhabitants, its government projects that almost another three hundred thousand people will call the city home within the next twenty years, more than doubling its population and ensuring a need for an estimated 120,000 new employment opportunities. In preparation for this expansion, the Ipswich City Council created a twenty-year plan for the development of the city. Now in 2018, seven years later, the council has decided to extend its original plans by setting up a Smart City Program to direct the city’s growth. This kind of carefully guided development is possibly the reason it has been on the radar of the ICF since 2010, and is now in the running for Intelligent Community of the Year 2018.

This smart city portrait provides an overview of the smart city approach and intelligent solutions implemented in the Dutch City of Eindhoven. For its achievements, especially in regard to open innovation, the City of Eindhoven was named the "Intelligent Community of the Year 2011" by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF).

This smart city portrait provides an overview on the smart city strategy and intelligent solutions implemented in the City and nation-state of Singapore. Cities all over the world are applying new technologies to solve their problems and become smarter. Singapore’s take on technology, as endorsed by bee smart city, is that it should not be an end in itself – it should be made to serve the people, who should be firmly at the centre of the smart city concept. Singapore’s holistic strategy and innovative solutions can serve as best practice examples for many other cities around the world.

This smart city portrait provides an overview on the smart city strategy and intelligent solutions implemented in the City of Amsterdam. The Dutch capital city, is one of the early adopters of smart city strategies in Europe, following their strategic smart city approach since 2008. Today, the city is one of the leading smart cities in Europe.