How is civil society and Openstreetmap contributing to the smart city big picture
Smart Cities have gone a long way since the term was first coined in 1976 when Barbara Ward defined them as just not the geographical settlements of people but the ‘home of man’. Since then, many good use cases have championed in the global urban scenario.
In a social economy schema[1], government representatives and urban visionaries have played a major role to broaden the portfolio of leading smart cities over the years. A second important player in this context comes from the private sector, as the EU defined a smart city as “a place where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital and telecommunication technologies, for the benefit of its inhabitants and businesses”. It is clear that many private companies and corporations have contributed to this trend, participating in big scale operations in partnerships with the public sector.
Singapore has aggressively implemented congestion charging while also making substantial investments in road sensors, phased traffic lights, and smart parking. Other cities are successfully developing their local public transportation system based on the use of electric vehicles. Barcelona has 500 hybrid taxis on the streets, as well as nearly 300 public electric vehicles and an estimated 400 private electric cars. The city of Oslo has made strides in using information technology to curb energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
These projects are really attractive for public institutions and private companies in their endeavor to assure a substantial improvement in the everyday life of regular citizens. They can also provide with enhanced returns on investment, not only for private but also for public companies.
Roles and strategies of the parties
As nearly 60 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2030, efficiency when running a city is cumbersome for smart cities. Foreseeing this need for overpopulated megalopolis in the near future, many larger municipalities have put in place advanced solutions; e.g. using advanced sensors to wirelessly manage streetlights, running more clean transport systems, innovating with aerial transport to give access to poorer areas of the metropolis or optimizing traffic signals to lower energy costs.
These decisions require also not only a role played by private companies and their technologies but also from organized citizens providing data and local knowledge in a regular fashion. The enabling technologies for this end are generally referred as “civic tech”, mainly information technology gathering engagement or participation from the public for a stronger development, also enhancing citizen communications and strengthening government infrastructure; generally improving the provision of public goods. However, the role of civil society in these complex projects and initiatives is not as visible as the one of the two remaining members of the social economy schema.
Maybe this is because in terms of strategies most of smart cities use a top-down digital approach. They conceive digital initiatives and smart technology services by purchasing costly infrastructure from state of the art technology companies, putting them into place, and then pushing out smaller, use case implementations downstream. Surprisingly, complementary bottom up approaches can help to sustain the growth of smart cities including all stakes, nurturing a healthy urban development. This is the case for many mapping initiatives that can crowdsource software developments and free available data from civil society grassroots, making the smart city a more inclusive model.
Smart city bottom up use cases
A use case in which civil society is contributing to the Smart Cities scenario is that of the Openstreetmap OSM community, also called the Wikipedia of maps. This initiative triggers collaborative efforts through mapping projects that are undertaken with by people with common interests to improve their cities over a particular topic. The Smart City concept has been used for years now by this global community supported by 3, 7 million users. In this regard, civic technologies are opening totally new urban spaces.
For instance, in the city of Portland, TriMet, the public agency that provides bus, light rail and commuter rail transit services is aided by the community by including multimodal transportation plans using the OSM platform. Government officials are in turn committed to support the OSM community, releasing their own governmental data to the public.
Also, indoor mapping — the use of technologies for capturing spatial data of indoor areas of buildings– is done by the OSM ecosystem through a solution called Osiris, targeted to small / medium projects like smart buildings and campuses. A comprehensive smart city project In Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, motivated local stakeholders and volunteers to take training together with local officials (universities, city officials and government) to establish a joint public / civic OSM community in the city.
More recently, Canada’s national statistics agency is testing the power of civil society in cities. They are testing the use of urban crowdsourcing using a bottom up approach through a project that aims to map Ottawa’s buildings. As part of a pilot project, people living in Ottawa — Gatineau are asked to contribute with information about local buildings to the Openstreetmap platform. An especially designed OSM ID-Editor allows regular users to edit attributes from a building mapped in a layer or they can create an entirely new point or area. Although at this point measurements will not replace any of the traditional surveying, the agency wants to see whether crowdsourcing can be used as an additional tool of data collection.
Insights and ideas
A great space for public / civic partnerships within the smart cities’ outlook is being opened by civic technologies. Privates and public interests involved in smart city plans should seriously consider a more active role coming from the city grassroots and other social entrepreneur’s initiatives. Likewise, a good smart city plan should always include bottom up approaches to assure a sustainable development in a leading city. The seamless integration of these kinds of initiatives from below to the top in urban development policies calls for a real paradigm shift in the ways government and private companies understand smart cities.
Making sure that a smart city is able to include wisely civil society resources and actors is cumbersome. It entails for the rest of stakeholders embracing more innovative approaches including nontraditional actors, accepting their capacity to make available innovative socio technological advances but also offering them a stake in the future of the smart city under consideration. An open minded approach, along with a clear identification and understanding of civic grassroots alternatives and their features, is advisable if private and public sectors really want to make their efforts sustainable in smart cities.
