Smart cities: Tech is great, but don’t forget the people
Playbook
The benefits of smart, connected infrastructure are real and have been proven.When multiple data sources come together in one place, for example through the London Datastore, it can become a powerful tool for city planners. In Greenwich, it has been demonstrated that a combination of different electric mobility solutions – such as electric vehicles (EV), e-bikes, EV charging, smart parking, and smart lamp posts – can work together to create a true smart city model, with data fused from different devices and sensors to provide valuable insights for policymakers.
Cities can build on this model to bring together data from different domains, such as traffic, air quality, public lighting, buildings’ energy, and parking, among others. Ourlatest playbook on smart street infrastructuredemonstrates the joint impact of combining multiple smart technologies on carbon reductions, service delivery, and business models, and is available to any city in the process of rolling out Internet of Things (IoT) solutions at a district or city-wide level.
The adoption of smart infrastructure needs to be managed carefully and transparently. Engaging the local community in decisions about data collection and the use of data insights is paramount to the success of pilot projects and their potential forscale. In doing so, cities can gain a more granular understanding of local contexts and therefore pinpoint in advance the specific areas and issues smart technology can help to address.
In Sharing Cities we’ve used a range of citizen -centric methods to enable greater collaboration between communities and stakeholders, from co-design workshops to user journey mapping, to help us understand how different groups of people might interact with different types of technologies. We’ve also developed a digital community engagement platform, the Digital Social Market – an app designed to encourage behavior change and environmentally conscious choices using peer-to-peer incentives and rewards.
This design approach – most crucially, led by needs and driven by outcomes – has delivered substantial benefits to our demonstrator districts, not only in exceeding our environmental targets, but more importantly in creating solutions that are adopted by the local community and are built to last.
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Story byCities Today
Cities Today is the leading news platform on urban mobility and innovation, reaching an international audience of city leaders.Cities Today is the leading news platform on urban mobility and innovation, reaching an international audience of city leaders.
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