By Paul Timmers - 18th November 2011
If smart cities are to enhance the quality of lives, the participation of their inhabitants is crucial, writes Paul Timmers.
Cities are home to three quarters of the European population; they account for three quarters of our energy consumption and they generate three quarters of the EU’s carbon emissions.
It is thus no accident that the European commission wants cities in Europe to target sustainability and climate and energy efficiency goals.
A “smart” approach to setting our climate and energy targets in a city context should also bring clear social and economic benefits. It should lead to a better quality of life for all city inhabitants and to thriving industries founded on technological innovation, as well as more attractive cities. For city managers, “smarter” cities should also attract “smarter” business activities.
A “smart” approach will clearly depend on deployment of ICT or digital technologies. However, achieving a full set of benefits - not just around sustainability, but that touch businesses and citizens too - will require thinking beyond the deployment of technology.
From the perspective of ICT, that means issues such as interoperability, measurement and user behaviour, need to be considered from the outset.
The various realms of activity that can contribute to achieving carbon-neutrality in cities include energy management in buildings (including generation of energy), electric mobility (electric vehicles, and related infrastructure and services), and eServices (such as eHealth, eCare, and eGovernment).
Scaling up such activities remains challenging - for instance, smart management solutions have progressed from buildings to neighbourhoods, but have yet to be proven at the level of cities - and in achieving progressive integration between them.
Interoperability - the ability for things to communicate effectively, and for systems to be integrated in such a way that they operate coherently in response to the users’ requirements - is thus a first and fundamental requirement.
Challenges also lie in making the best possible use of limited budgets. In terms of infrastructure management, part of the approach must be to find synergies when renovating existing urban networks: overcoming the traditional segmentation of utilities in order to provide integrated smart services through their distribution networks.
Once again this calls for such networks to become increasingly interoperable and accessible. The added value for Europe is in achieving de facto open standards facilitating interoperability and enabling cross-border market development.
A second consideration is putting in place schemes for data collection and agreeing on metrics. A primary aim of smart cities is to make progress towards our climate and energy targets, and deploying technological solutions to that end.
To do this, it is crucial to understand what works and what does not. Much progress has been achieved by the ICT industry towards a establishing a common measurement framework for capturing its carbon emissions and energy intensity.
The next step is to establish a framework for capturing the improvements in energy efficiency and reductions in carbon emissions that smart ICT solutions can enable. There is certainly scope to apply the resulting information and data in a city context.
Reliable data can serve to inform policy makers, businesses and citizens when making choices. Applications and services based on such data can help increase citizen awareness and engage them in energy-saving or low-carbon activities.
The insights gained from transparent metrics can make the difference between cities that end up actually increasing their carbon footprints and ones that achieve real efficiency gains through deploying the right solutions.
Thirdly, there are significant challenges related to engaging citizens. One thing is deploying technology, another is having citizens make use of it.
As we have seen from the many and varied pilot projects throughout Europe on the effectiveness of smart meters in reducing energy bills, technology is an important enabler but in itself does not lead to the desired effect.
The results of such pilots demonstrate that the role of the consumer is a crucial one and that efforts must be made to involve them through education and interaction.
The quality of education or attempts to interact with consumers depends in turn on how well they are known and understood. If smart cities are to enhance quality of lives, their inhabitants must be invited to participate and contribute their smartness too.
As a final word, relevant initiatives are taking off. Through the green digital charter, European cities have set out how they can take the lead in exploiting ICT to accelerate progress towards our 2020 targets.
The charter commits its signatory cities - so far 24 - to deploy five large-scale ICT pilots per city by 2015 and reduce their direct ICT carbon footprint by 30 per cent per city by 2020.
